Ah, it seems like only yesterday when MySpace was the biggest and most important website in the world. I remember attending a music biz pow-wow about five years ago and being told by a manager that as an artist I would not be taken seriously if I didn’t have a MySpace. Well, five years on and the opposite is almost certainly true—if you are a new artist and all you have is a MySpace, you are not going to be taken seriously.

“I’ve never understood musicians who don’t enjoy doing promotional interviews,” he says. “I just can’t believe it. I always think, ‘Your life must have been so brilliant before you were in a band.’ Because my life was shit, and this is great. Even after all these years, at 44 years of age, whenever the label asks if I want to go to New York to do promos, I always say yes immediately. And the label is always like, ‘Are you sure? It’s going to require a lot of interviews?’ And I’m like — I don’t give a fuck. You’re gonna fucking fly me first class to New York and put me in this amazing hotel? And my wife can go fucking shopping four hours a day? What is not to like about that? I fucking love doing press conferences. I don’t want to suggest it’s all a joke, but come on — the president holds fucking press conferences. Why am I here? Why not enjoy it? I’ve never felt like I had anything important to say. I can tell a few jokes and we can talk irreverently about fame and success and sport and bullshit and all the crazy people you meet. But I have nothing to say.”

This is not accurate.

Muxtape, for those of you that don’t obsessively follow every startup, is a new site that allows users to stream mp3s others have uploaded. If you create an account you can create a ‘muxtape’ of up to 12 songs at any one time. Want more than 12? Tough. You’re going to have to delete one of the ones already there.

At first, I couldn’t quite see what the point of this was. If you wanted to share your stuff with others why not just dump it somewhere like Box.net and give people the link? There are limits to the number of songs there, too, but they’re measured in the hundreds not in the dozens. Or dozen. You can’t download the songs from Muxtape either and if you’re outside of America you can’t even buy the songs through the ‘Buy this mp3′ link (since it leads to the US-only Amazon MP3 Store which for some reason doesn’t like the colour of my money).

So why even bother with it? One reason: RSS. By providing an individual RSS feed for every muxtape you can subscribe to a user whose musical taste you respect and have a semi-consistent stream of song recommendations come into your feed reader. For someone like me, who no longer has convenient access to good radio stations, this is a godsend. Instead of pestering friends about what songs they’re liking at the moment I can follow their muxtape and keep up to date with what I might be interested in. Why other streaming services like Last.fm haven’t got something similar is a mystery to me but their loss is Muxtape’s gain.

There is one limitation to the service I’m finding very frustrating: you’re only able to upload mp3 files. Recently, I’ve been ripping my CDs in AAC format and so as a result Muxtape won’t let me share them (‘at the moment’, the dialog box tantalisingly teases). Fixing this would make me a lot happier. AAC is a popular codec and can be played back by numerous devices. It’s also the default encoding format in iTunes which means that less tech-savvy people might not understand why the songs on their computer won’t upload. (I should note an April blog post from the Muxtape people assures us it is coming.)

Still, if all you want to do is enjoy what’s out there that’s not really an issue. And you can of course convert AAC to mp3 if you really have to share that Leona Lewis song with everyone.

To sum it up: it’s fun, you can follow other’s music recommendations but there’s no AAC at the moment. Now, the important stuff: my Muxtape is here. Happy listening.

Still, try as I might, it’s not always easy to give Apple money. Especially when you’re in a different country to them. As most people are aware Apple segments their online stores by country. If you don’t have a credit card issued from a bank in the respective country it’s almost impossible to purchase from the store. This is the case even if your credit card will otherwise work in that country (as mine does). Why does Apple do this? I’m sure they’d blame the rightsholders who license content for the store and maybe they’d be right. I can’t help but think it’s a nice way for Apple to extract maximum value from different markets.

Now I’m a believer in both the power of globalisation and the power of the Internet and I’d be damned if some artificial trade barrier was going to stop my monetary transaction. Also, and more importantly, music is cheaper at the US iTunes Store. This is the case even when you take into account the Australian dollar-US dollar exchange rate. After my last foray into downloading from iTunes I was also eager to give it another whirl and see for myself if those download problems weren’t first day jetters after all.

First step was to try to create an account at the store. I knew it probably wasn’t going to work but I felt it was worth a try. But nope, no sooner had I entered my credit card details than Apple informed me no can do. Not put off I moved onto Plan B.

I was aware that not so long ago Apple had started taking PayPal payments. Well, I had a PayPal account, I thought. It was connected to the Australian subsidiary but they weren’t to know that. Turns out they were to know that. I didn’t progress any further than I had with my direct credit card attempt.

Now it was time to tap into the vast data store that is the Internet. With Google at my side I tried looking for sites talking about purchasing from the iTunes Store in the US. If there are any doubts in your mind as to how US-centric the web is try that search on for size. I had more luck finding information on purchasing from the Japanese iTunes Store. You could almost see Fate chuckling at me.

It was MetaFilter which came to the rescue with their excellent and answer subsite. A bright spark there explained iTunes Gift Cards could not only be redeemed by those outside the country but could be used to set up an account without an associated credit card. My prayers had been answered! Or almost answered. There was one small snag. It turns out you can’t buy iTunes Gift Cards for the US store outside of the US. Gift cards in other regions are tied to their version of iTunes. I’d known it was too good to be true. And then I remembered eBay.

Blessed, blessed eBay: where you can find almost anything for sale. And there they were! Two US$15 iTunes Cards for about US$34. Sure there was a markup but it wasn’t much and the guy was willing to email me the codes. Instant gratification! I quickly paid my knight in shining armour, set up Outlook to check for new messages every minute and waited. It didn’t take long. Soon the codes were in my inbox and almost as quickly punched into the iTunes Store. Oh, sure there were a few extra steps. I did have to create an identity for myself in the US. I do hope Apple doesn’t actually try to contact the phone number I provided. Unless they want to order a Domino’s pizza, that is.

So I was in. And what a rush! There was something almost illicit about it. My hands trembled as I looked over all that I could purchase. For some reason it hadn’t occurred to me that I would now be able to purchase not only cheap music but movies and television shows. I could download episodes of the Daily Show! The excitement in the room was palpable.

Still, as tempting as it might have been to order a TV show or a movie (Oh my God! I just remembered they have old Law and Order episodes!) I told myself to remember why I was there. I was there to purchase music. This was for science. I couldn’t let myself be distracted by the bright lights and vivid colours of Pixar’s movies. Clicking on the iTunes Plus link I delved further into the shop.

I already knew what album I wanted. It was the Queen Greatest Hits CD I’d seen on the Australian store for $20. $20?! Ha! Who did they think I was? Joe Average Knucklehead? I wasn’t going to pay $20 for something that came to me down an Internet tube! At least not when it was possible, at least in theory, to get the very same content for a lower price.

Unfortunately Fate hadn’t finished laughing yet. See it turns out in Australia Queen’s music is licensed by EMI. But in the United States its handled by Hollywood Records (who distributed through Universal). Since EMI is the only major label to agree to selling its music DRM-free this meant that while I could buy Queen in the iTunes Plus format in Australia (so long as I didn’t mind being milked) I couldn’t from the US store. Aren’t intellectual property laws wonderful!

But not being able to download the album I wanted was only a minor inconvenience. There were still plenty of other fish in the sea. I like AIR and noticed they had released a new album. After briefly checking out some reviews to ensure it wasn’t another 10,000 Hz Legend I clicked to go to the checkout and start downloading.

Now the last time I downloaded something from iTunes it was not a pleasant experience. Komala assured me this wasn’t typical of regular usage and I’m pleased to confirm she is correct. The downloading began straightaway and went off without a hitch. In about five minutes or so I’d sucked down the whole thing and it was only sheer restraint that prevented me from grabbing something else.

All in all, this time around the whole thing was very positive (once I’d set up the account that is). It was more contrived than it ought to have been for 2007 but such is the current state of intellectual property. With any luck the new Amazon store that’s set to launch later this year will make this whole process a lot easier. In which case I’ll give up fighting to give Apple my money. I don’t like Steve Jobs that much.

Well, maybe not. I’m sorry to say that my first experience with the process wasn’t particularly positive. First step was to upgrade to iTunes 7.2. I’m not sure why this is necessary but long ago I stopped questioning why various iTunes upgrades were required. If the Mighty Steve issues a dictate I obey it. With iTunes updated I moseyed over to my iTunes account (up until this point only useful for downloading album art) and ‘enabled’ iTunes Plus. ‘iTunes Plus’ is what Apple is calling their sans-DRM files. As well as sporting improved portability these files are also encoded at a higher fidelity than the old 99c ($1.70 if you’re unlucky enough to be a member of the Australian store) ones did.

OK, so far and so good. Downloading a 30 MB file isn’t the most user friendly experience in the world but it could be worse. Rest assured, it got worse.

Just as an aside: Is there no way for Apple to make their software more modular? Perhaps I’ve become spoilt by Firefox’s automatic update system (which, coincidentally, is updating itself as I write this) but frankly, if you’re a major developer producing software in the year 2007 and you require me to manually download your entire program every time you fix a bug you’ve screwed up somewhere. It shouldn’t be this difficult.

I digress. The next step was to see if there was any music I actually wanted. Luckily for me EMI is the big music label based in England and controls the works of a number of English artists I like. I recently listened to a dynamite live set from Arctic Monkeys on Triple J and decided their new album, Favourite Worst Nightmare, would be a good one to experiment with. Purchasing music on iTunes is notoriously easy and after adding Favourite Worst Nightmare to my shopping cart it was all I could do not to toss a few other ones in there as well. When I’m in an actual store and I have CDs in my hands they have a certain weight – the weight of responsibility saying, ‘You can’t afford all this music.’ But online there is no weight; it’s effortless. I don’t even take out my wallet so there’s no moment where I realise this is my grocery money I’m spending. Luckily I was able to hold firm this time but who knows what will happen if more labels start to add their music. What of Amazon’s upcoming store? If I can purchase music at US prices… well, I might never be seen again.

I say ‘might’ because I’m not particularly looking forward to using the iTunes Store again. While things up to this point in the story were relatively positive it quickly went downhill when I tried to actually download the music I’d purchased. You see, when you purchase songs in iTunes it automatically begins to download them. Or so the theory goes. For me it was a little less with the downloading and a little more with the endless waiting. While the download appeared to initiate it didn’t seem to want to go any further than that first step regardless of what I did. Occasionally one file would randomly download while another complained that the network connection was timing out. Deciding maybe it was just slow I left the computer on overnight and went to bed, looking forward to listening to my new music on the train to work in the morning. Unfortunately my early morning commute was without musical accompaniment. I awoke to find the download still pretty much where I’d left it – going nowhere. Since a torrent had successfully downloaded overnight I knew the problem wasn’t that the connection had dropped out.

I tried it a few more times and was able to get most of the songs from the album barring four or so. Not quite the replacement for going down to the old record store. I tried again 12 hours later upon coming back from work and met with varying degrees of success. Again, some files whizzed by while others stagnated. One track in particular, ‘If You Were There, Beware’, is still refusing to download as I type this. I’ve grown so desperate I’ve emailed Apple technical support in the hopes of a resolution to this problem. I’ll let you know how that goes.

All in all, not exactly the type of experience that fills one with confidence. I want to like this. It’s what I’ve been waiting for it for years. I guess I can wait a little longer.

So why I am missing music? Well to be more specific I’m missing two things: Australian music and new music. Although the latter eventually tends to make its way over here it’s still not uncommon for ‘new music’ in Japan to be months, if not a year or so, old. This varies greatly depending on the artist and the record label and there are occasions where almost the opposite is true. Having said that, though, Australian music rarely gets to Japan unless it’s played in an iPod commercial. This makes me very sad since back in Australia my radio station of choice was the ABC’s ‘Youth Network’ Triple J. For those reading this who aren’t very familiar with the Australian radio landscape Triple J is to MTV what the Village Voice is to E! Entertainment Television.

Triple J’s specialities are Australian music and new music. Unburdened by the requirements of a corporate network (the ABC is the government-funded broadcaster in Australia) Triple J was free to play music without needing to worry about whether it would be popular or not. That a great deal of music would eventually find its way onto the commercial networks was testament to the programming skills of the boffins working at Triple J. Still, there’s plenty of music that for whatever reason would never get any airplay were it not for Triple J. It’s this music in particular – obscure Australian hip-hop for instance – that I was most missing.

So I like Triple J. I’m sure some of you are already heading to the comments section as you read this to let me know, ‘Mike, you can stream Triple J to your heart’s content. You can even do it in mp3 format.’ Yes, this is true. After initially only supporting Real Media and Windows Media streams Triple J also streams all their content in mp3 format (you can listen to it here). This would almost be good enough were it not for my iPod. As it stands a great deal of the music I consume listen to is on my iPod and needing to be chained to my computer just doesn’t cut it.

I like to think it’s here that a lesser man would have simply given up and thought, ‘There are more productive things I can do with my time.’ Not I. Sure, there’s plenty of things I could be doing but if I used that as the criterion for deciding what to do I’d never attempt anything stupid. Having lacked a project I could really sink my teeth into I decided that the only sensible thing to do in this situation was to set it up so that I could record the Triple J stream and listen to it later. When I say it like that it hardly sounds difficult at all, and indeed that stage took me all of about 10 minutes hunting on the Internet to come across Streamripper.

Realising there was still a good deal of Friday (and possibly Saturday!) left I decided that wasn’t enough. Recording the stream into an mp3 was kind of useful but it was still sitting on my HDD. Would it be great, I thought to myself, if instead of having to manually import it I could get it added to iTunes automatically? Hell, yeah! In fact it’d be better than great. It’d be frickin’ awesome. And if I owned an Apple laptop instead of an Acer one another five minutes probably would have seen the end of this story. One of those sleek Macbook Pros still alude me, however, so despite the hard work of ‘Doug’ and his ‘AppleScripts’ this was a road I was going to have to walk alone.

After having a look around it became clear that the best way to do this was with the assistance of Dircaster. Although not the best written piece of code it looked sturdy enough for what I wanted. But then I started to get ahead of myself (as I am want to do). When I imported the podcasts I wanted them to include all the neat sort of information and to be properly titled like they would be in a professional podcast. Since the Triple J stream doesn’t send information about the broadcast (like who the DJ is or what the name of the song playing back is) I’d have to add this by myself. I then started looking around for a way to edit the tag information of mp3s via the command line (since I wanted this to be something I could schedule Windows to do in the background it needed to be all command line-driven). It took me quite some time hunting with Google until I came across the rather simply named Tag.

After setting Tag up and working all the bugs out I imported my test track into iTunes only to discover, much to my frustration, none of the information had been imported across. Opening up the original mp3 in Winamp I could see the information there. Then I noticed the information was all in the ID3v1 field. Checking that Tag text file again I noticed that its ‘support for multiple standards’ was limited to ‘reading and removing’ ID3v2. Well what good was that? I may as well have been editing the data with Paint! My search commenced again without delay and eventually I found my way to metamp3. Hoorah! Here was what I was looking for: an ID3 editor that wrote ID3v2 tags.

Now as I mentioned above I really wanted this to be all done through the command line so I could write up a batch script that would automate the entire process. Unfortunately this meant handling the FTP transfer to my web server using Microsoft’s FTP program. After wrestling with it and its awful, awful, awful documentation I managed to get the file from point A (which is to say, my HDD) to point B (the web server) only to discover on retransfer back to my computer that it was all garbled. At this I threw my hands up in the air and decided to just download another FTP client.

However, no sooner had I done this than I realised this was all moot. The stream I wanted to record most of all was Richard Kingsmill’s 2007 programme: a three hour broadcast on Sunday evenings of the latest music. Three hours?! At 128 kbps?! Why didn’t I think about this first?! A file recorded in that quality was likely to be close to 180 MB or so. Not only would that take forever to both upload to my web server and then download back to my computer but it would exceed the storage space I have.

It was at this point that I could think of only one thing: shit. I’d spent hours on this already, far too long to give up. It had been my intention to avoid permanently running an HTTP server on my laptop but desperate times called for desperate measures. Still, there was one thing I knew. If I was going to run a web server all the time I sure as hell was going to make sure it was small. Eschewing the more popular Apache I decided to have a fling with the awkwardly named lighttpd. Only problem was that the web site hosting the Windows installation was down. For hours. (It’s back up now.) This wasn’t going to stop me, though. Searching around Google’s cache I discovered the files were mirrored.

I now thought I was near the end of the road. It was mid-afternoon by this point and having been working on this for a few hours I thought my quest had finally come to an end. I mean what could go wrong? Plenty could go wrong, it seems. The most major being that lighttp wouldn’t work. Or to be more specific, it wouldn’t work as a background process. It worked fine as if I ran it manually but I didn’t want to do this. I wanted it to be hidden so I could forget it was there. In the end I tried everything short of compiling the original source code myself. You can’t keep an idiot down, though, and I saw this for what it really was; not a reason to give up on such a pointless exercise, but as a hurdle, to be surmounted as one would surmount any hurdle: in short shorts (it was very hot yesterday).

In my search for a mirror of the Windows version of lighttpd I had come across a Hungarian version for Windows. Dismissing it as not worth my time I reconsidered, thinking perhaps I had been too harsh on the Hungarians. After all, plenty of good things had come out of Hungary. None that I can easily recall but, shit, if American Samoa can employ people to run its Office of Tourism (although evidently not a web designer) then Hungary must have produced something worth writing home about. Feeling a new found connection to my Hungarian brothers I dove into the WLMP Project. (Oh, and I note that the English version of WLMP now appears to be working.)

So, with my trusty Hungarian version of lighttpd working as it was supposed to (thank you Budapest!), with PHP already installed, with Dircaster… dircasting I was surely close to the finish line. Time to run a test version. Not that there’s anything that could go wrong. I mean it worked before. I hadn’t done anything special. Even the Hungarian version of lighttpd was working like it was supposed to. This was just going to be a quick once over before bed. Just fire it up, run that batch script and — and, oh, look… Dircaster doesn’t work anymore.

Yes, in spite of the fact that Dircaster had been working just fine up to this point it decided now it had had enough and it was throwing in the towel. A better programmer than I would probably have looked upon this as a challenge. I looked upon it with tears. Why couldn’t it just work? Why was this all so hard? I had a file that I wanted to import into iTunes as a podcast. Why can’t iTunes just periodically check a folder? Why must I be on a Mac to achieve this awesome feat? Why Steve, why?!?!

There were a lot of questions but I knew no answers would be forthcoming. No, there was only one way out and that was to fix the Dircaster script myself. Pushing the thought of sleep from my mind I fired up my trusty text editor and leapt into the fray, inserting debug statements everywhere to try and work out what was going wrong. Now while I hold a degree in computer science I don’t think it’s from a very good university so it didn’t surprise me that this rather simple bug took me all of about an hour to track down. To be fair to me, it was late, I was tired and it’s always difficult reading someone else’s code. To be honest, the code was very well documented and I am just not very good. Still, I did eventually find the solution and with a quick ‘delete’ it was done. (Having fixed this problem there was still another few alterations that I had to make but after having done that it finally worked.)

I went to bed knowing that in spite of a day that had otherwise been a complete write-off I could go to sleep knowing that on Monday I would be able to listen to the dulcet tones of Richard Kingsmill while I went to school: a joy I knew no one else on the train would be stupid enough to even bother attempting.

Of course I can’t quite do it just yet. Try as I might I haven’t found any online stores selling EMI music sans-DRM so far. I figure this is probably because the iTunes Store is supposed to get first bite of the cherry. In the press announcement Apple’s Steve Jobs explained that EMI’s music would appear on the iTunes Store in May so hopefully we’ll have only another month to wait.

It’s not just a lack of DRM that we can look forward to, though. The EMI announcement also foretold of a world of higher quality downloadable music. This is fantastic news for anyone who wants to replace buying CDs with downloading mp3s. At the moment most online services (including the iTunes Store) sell their music with a far lower bit rate than you would get if you ripped a CD yourself. In other words, not only are downloadable copies saddled with restrictive DRM but they’re not even as good quality as CDs. When the new songs become available, however, this will change. Jobs announced that the iTunes Store which currently sells music at a bit rate of 128 kbps would be upping that to 256 kbps.

Who wants to wait until May for all of this, though? One of the benefits of listening to the entire conference (I, er, was bored) was that I heard Eric Nicoli, Chairman of EMI, mention that music from Damon Albarn’s new band The Good, The Bad & The Queen was not only part of the digital catalogue that would be available soon but was in fact available for sale from their web site right now. This was too good an opportunity to miss and I immediately paused the press conference and availed myself of the opportunity to consume.

Although Apple will offer the new versions sans-DRM they won’t be in mp3 format. Apple eschews mp3 for their preferred alternative, AAC. It wasn’t clear to me from the press conference what we could expect from other stores as a result. If my The Good, The Bad & The Queen experience is any indication we don’t have to worry. Not only were tracks available as mp3s but they were sampled with a bir rate of 320 kbps! This is the maximum bit rate mp3 supports. It’s a little difficult to directly compare mp3 and AAC so I won’t try and start an argument about which is better, suffice to say that at this bit rate they’re both much higher quality than what we’ve had thus far.

The purchasing process was as easy as one would hope it would be. I went to the web site, clicked a few links to get to the purchase page, entered my credit card details and voila! The songs were ready for me to download. Downloading was a little bit of a pain as I had to download the songs one at a time but as the site itself pointed out, this can be remedied with a download manager (such as Flashgot).

All up the album cost me £7.99 to purchase. This works out to be a little less than AUS$20. For some of you this might not be the massive discount you were hoping digital distribution would bring. Indeed, I could probably have got the album cheaper if I’d been able to find it on sale or in a bargain bin. However, considering I a) am in Japan and b) was able to complete the purchase in all of about 5 minutes I’m hardly going to complain.

I’m hopeful prices will drop now that online services can more directly compete with one another but we’ll have to see. Frankly, for the moment I’m happy. As I said back when I started using AllofMP3, this is as much about sending a message as anything. If I really wanted the lowest possible price I could just find a torrent. But I do enjoy buying music and if EMI has now made that possible for me in the digital age then I feel they desrve my support. At least for one album.

A few things have been rattling around inside my head since the story broke. First of all, what will this mean for Apple? Jobs has been claiming since at least February that he’s been against DRM from the beginning. This seems to have had more to do with trying to get European regulators of his back than actually changing things. (In the wake of Jobs’ essay, various labels came forward to say that they had pleaded with Apple to sell their music without DRM, all to no effect.) Either way, now his wish has come true and I wonder what this means, particularly for the ludicrous price mark-ups those of us from outside the United States are charged.

As anyone with a calculator can quickly tell you, every non-American customer pays more for their music than their American brethren. Moreover, you can’t use an iTunes Store if the nationality of your credit card differs from the nationality of the store. So while I can browse the US store (and even preview files), if I try to buy any I’m told my money isn’t welcome here. So long as Apple didn’t really have to compete with online music stores (the iTunes Store dwarfs all others) this racket hummed along quite steadily. But this will no longer be the case. The Good, The Bad & The Queen didn’t care that I placed an order in their British store from Japan with my Australian credit card. I suspect the same will be true of most online stores.

And what of AAC? Plenty of devices play it back but with nothing approaching the ubiquity of mp3. Will Apple abandon AAC if people abandon the iTunes Store in favour of mp3?

And what of video? Apple says music and video are different but don’t the same interoperable arguments apply to it as well as music? Especially with the growth of portable video players, whether they be an added extra with your new BMW sports utility vehicle or part of your latest cell phone, Joe Consumer is going to want to be able to transfer video between devices. Presumably people will be as pissed off when they realise all those Pixar movies they bought to entertain Junior on the trip to Grandma’s won’t work as they were when they found out Aqua’s ‘Barbie Girl’ was trapped on their PC. (Possibly more pissed off since the films will have cost ten times as much.) DRM might make sense for rental video but if purchasing online truly starts to take off and DVD sales continue to slide, what then?

Finally, what does this all mean for Big Content? The decision to ditch DRM by EMI seems to be a further step towards fully embracing a radically different distribution model to the one that has made all these companies filthy rich. But while many may see this as the final nail in the coffin for Digital Rights Management it seems to me to be one more nail in the coffin of the entertainment industry as we know it. Are we going to need record stores any more? Are we going to need record labels? If The Good, The Bad & The Queen can sell their music to me directly what exactly is EMI providing them with again?

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.