inqk.net

Today I purchased my first music online. Oh sure, I’d set up an account with the Australian iTunes Music Store so that I could grab one of their free tracks but once I realised that the music I bought from the iTMS wasn’t actually going to work with the music player I own I decided there wasn’t much of a future in that relationship. While AllofMP3 has been tempting me for some time now it wasn’t until I finally arrived in Japan and was confronted with the prices they pay for CDs here that I decided it was worth taking the plunge.

And to be honest, so far my experience has been pretty positive. I created an account at the AllofMP3 web site in about a minute, added US$25 to my account and started looking for music to grab. I had already downloaded the AllTunes program that acts as an iTunes-esque front-end for the store but once I realised that it was using Internet Explorer’s Trident rendering engine I returned to the warm embrace of Firefox to surf around their web interface.

I selected three albums that I was interested in – Gnarls Barkley’s St. Elsewhere, Lily Allen’s Alright, Still and Bloc Party’s Silent Alarm – and had the most difficult moment of the entire experience, deciding what quality I wanted them in. Granted at the price you pay at AllofMP3 there’s really not that much difference. In the end it was the thought of the extra space it would take up on my HDD and the fact that the speakers I have here really aren’t good enough to tell the difference between lossy and lossless, at least for pop music, that prompted me to just go for 192 kbps mp3s. After all, that’s good enough for most of the other music I have on my computer.

There’s a slight delay between the ‘purchase’ of the tracks and when you can actually download them. Since downloading them via the web interface requires you to manually go through right-clicking each one and saving to your computer I fired up AllTunes once more and it automatically started downloading away. Pretty soon they were done and on my computer. Frankly, I was almost disappointed. I expected there to be more problems.

The tracks come with some rudimentary tag information but still required some editing to match the music already in my iTunes database. Oh, and there was no album art. Thankfully, Coveralia was to the rescue and that problem was solved. All in all, it was a pretty positive experience and I can see myself purchasing more music from AllofMP3 in the future. Why download it from a Russian site when I could just get it for free? Well, because I have a job now, I feel like I should have the disposable income to afford this type of thing and, most important of all, I really want to send a message to the record companies that I will pay for music but I want it to be cheap, I want it to be easy and I want it to be in a format convenient for me without digital rights management technology preventing me from using it where I want and when I want.

Hopefully AllofMP3 can make more beautiful music together. At least until they shut it down.