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A while ago I read an article about the Russian music site, "allofmp3.com". This site offers a catalog of some 300,000 songs from around the world. In addition to boasting a large catalog, including albums by the Beatles, they provide songs and entire albums in DRM-free (non-copy-protected) formats. They will encode most songs for you in MP3, Ogg, WMA, MPC, FLAC, Monkey Audio, and MPEG-4 AAC (iTunes compatible) formats at a variety of bit rates you select at download time. Best of all, pricing is done on a per-megabyte-transmitted basis. That price is approximately 2 cents per megabyte, meaning that a typical song in high-quality MP3 format is going to be 5-6MB in size and cost you around 10-12 cents, and an entire album a couple of bucks in most cases. Download speeds from the cable modem connection in my home were about 40-50K per second. I suspect this is a "throttled" speed because I started a second download at the same time and it came down at about the same speed for both. You're probably thinking that this must be illegal. I've done a lot of reading elsewhere in the press and while the "RIAA equivalent" in Russia tried to shut the site down, they found that it is in fact operating in accordance with Russian law and their own licensing of the musical content they offer. So, in theory at least, they're a legal source of digital music until Russian copyright legislation is changed to make them an illegal operation. The way the site works is pretty simple. You pre-purchase a certain amount of music from them using one of several different payment methods they offer. Then you select some music you want to download. They'll ask you what format you want to use, what bitrate you prefer, and will then encode your music in the desired format. It will become available in a "My Downloads" section for 14 days. Once you've downloaded a song, they charge you for it. Until you download it, there's no charge. Charges are automatically deducted from your balance, and you can replenish that balance at any time. If you select MP3 format, they even fill in the ID3 V1 tags for you with the artist, album, and track name as well as the date the material was recorded. This makes most songs immediately ready for your music player. (They don't label track numbers in the ID3 tags, which is unfortunate, but that's a quick fix.) I've found the site to be a great way to plug up some of the "holes" in my music collection very inexpensively.
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