So I was watching The Office about a week ago and Dwight was talking to Pam about some Russian website that sold mp3s for like $0.10 each. Turns out, it wasn't made up.

allofmp3.com sells digital music for an average of $0.10/song, or a little over $1/album. The actual cost varies slightly based on the length of the songs and what encoding you choose. Yes... you choose the encoding type. They offer the choice of MPEG-1 Layer 3 - MP3, Windows Media Audio - WMA, Ogg Vorbis - OGG, MusePack - MPC, MPEG-4 AAC, and choice of bitrate as well. Most of the newer selections also offer you a choice of lossless encoding as well giving you larger filesizes but audio quality that matched the original CD. Lossless encoding is not available for many older releases.

The selection, while not rivaling iTunes, is certainly impressive. Browsing various genres, I was able to find 9 of 10 artists I was looking for without trying to be too obscure (from DJ Sasha to Dave Matthews to Fela Kuti even some single releases and remixes) and no, they aren't all in Russian...

Previews are in a low quality stream but are over a minute long and are satisfing enough to get the job done. The streaming link didn't work for me (some mime-type issue trying to download the webpage instead), but the download link worked fine. I previewed with my quicktime plugin rather than importing each preview into iTunes.

The purchasing process is a little different. Easy for the web savvy, but it isn't the 1-click simplicity that iTunes delivers. You create an account and instead of running every new purchase through your credit card, you deposit a certian amount of money in your account and each purchase is debited from there. Surely this will offset merchant charges on their end. It works very similarly to the EZ-PASS toll system we have here in the NYC area. You buy a song or album, select and available encoding format and bitrate (higher bit rates will be slightly more expensive) and then the system encodes the music for you while you wait or you can elect to be notified by email when the encoding is done.

To download your songs, you click on the "my downloads" link and select the album you purchase. A window will pop up and there will be a list of links to download your songs. If the system is still encoding songs, they will be listed but the link won't be active yet. The downside of this is that there is no option to download everything with one link. In fact, because browsers all handle formats differently, they warn you to right click and "save as.." each download link instead of just clicking on them normally. The reason for this is that many browsers will just load a plug-in, download the file to the browser cache, and start playing it. This leaves the user without the knowledge of where the file lives making it difficult to move it to their music library. Further complicating the issue is that once ther server detects you have successfully downloaded the file, the link is removed, so if you lose the file, you have to buy it again (which at $0.10/song isn't tragic but still inconvenient). But for the remotely savvy users this is nothing but a slight inconvenience. Once you save the file to your computer, you then simply import it into iTunes (or whatever media player you use).

Legality? Well rest assured, it is currently 100% legal for you to use. That is not to say there aren't questions looming. Because the company is in Russia, it adheres to Russian law and for now appears to be living in a grey area. But until that area becomes more defined, you can be sure Steve Jobs is casting an evil eye in their direction. They have a brief page with legal info and you can read some discussions on the legality of the website here and also in their entry at wikipedia

In conclusion, sorry Apple... as long as this is legit, I find it hard to pass up the savings at allofmp3.com. The iTunes Music Store remains far and away the best overall online storefront for digital music hands down, but for now, if there's something I want and can get it for 90% cheaper, I have to give up the slick interface for the thrifty bargain. And feel kind of naughty for doing it...

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