It has been a big week for music downloads over the internet in the US, with Sony unveiling its Connect service and Apple tweaking the remarkably successful iTunes.
Yet disappointingly for us Europeans, Apple hasn't set a date for their services to launch in the UK and Connect's arrival is still over a month away. The two companies' reticence has created a space that might not necessarily be filled by legitimate sites like Wippit and My Coke Music, but by a download service from Russia.
All Of MP3 is a site that was originally aimed at the Russian market. Now it has an English language mirror site, an extensive library of tunes on its servers and some rather unique features.
Most impressive of all is its pricing structure. While Sony and Apple both charge 99 cents for each track downloaded (or 79p for Connect in the UK), on All Of MP3 users can fill their hard drives with up to one gigabyte's worth of music for just $10. If they chose the lowest quality settings, with tracks encoded at 128kbps, that's at least 20 albums for not much more than six quid.
The question that is furrowing a few brows at Apple and Sony, to say nothing of the world's copyright agencies, revolves around whether the site is legal or not. Certainly the music on the site isn't licensed by any labels. Yet it seems it can operate in Russia courtesy of a legal loophole that allows music to be performed publicly without the authorisation of the copyright owner if it is broadcast on radio or transmitted over the internet.
Naturally, there are moves afoot to untangle the nation's archaic copyright laws, but with CD piracy rife (over 50 per cent of CDs sold in Russia are bootleg copies), the question of resolving issues over music downloads is a long way down the agenda.
To complicate things further, there are similar sites such as Weblisten, which operates out of Spain and is surviving in spite of the EU's much-tighter copyright laws.
So is it worth giving All Of MP3 a spin? The answer is: if you can square it with your conscience, a most definite yes. The site has plenty going for it and in an ideal world might even provide a template for future legitimate European music download services.
Signing up involves wading through an overly long registration process, but once you've finished you get an email from the company and you're away.
Actually buying music involves becoming what is known as a VIP member and putting some money into All Of MP3's account. There was no way on earth I was ever going to give my credit card details to the site, so I went for the more secure option of paying via PayPal.
Finding the music you want to download is the trickiest part. The site is not easy to navigate and features a search engine best described as temperamental. Fortunately, there are easy ways in, such as clicking on the list of the top 75 UK and US albums. The site also splits bands into an incredibly comprehensive array of sub-genres, which helps if you are only really interested in certain types of music.
Once you've found your album, you need to choose which format you want to download the music in. While iTunes offers AAC and Napster uses Windows Media, here you can download in either of those formats or plump for MP3, or the open-source system Ogg Vorbis (if only legit sites were as flexible). There are also music video files that can be downloaded in the MPEG 4 format.
Another significant advantage All Of MP3 has over its high-profile rivals is that users can determine the sound quality of the music by choosing between three different bit rates. There's the standard 128kbps, which is probably best for porting music on to portable devices, the mid range 192kbps and a top-end, near-CD standard of 320kbps.
We plumped for a couple of albums in 192kbps in MP3 and pressed download. Here things started getting a little complicated. All Of MP3 claims it can offer the different speeds due to its online encoding system. In reality, the tracks were available at such speeds that I'd wager that many of the albums in the most popular formats/speeds are off the peg and ready to go. Interestingly some albums can also be encoded with LossLess encoding systems like Monkey's Audio and FLAC that use the data of the original audio CD as the source.
Once the process has begun, you can set it up so it sends an email when each track is ready for transfer. If you are downloading a few albums, your inbox will clog up pretty quickly.
After an album has been downloaded to the server you then have to port it to your hard drive. Again things went a little awry and after three attempts at following the guidelines set out on the site I gave up and downloaded the All Of MP3 software, which does the transfers automatically. Unsurprisingly it isn't the quickest of downloads. Even with a fast - for the UK anyway -connection of 2Mbps it took ten minutes for the music to appear on my hard disk. The sound quality of the music was excellent and it seemed incredible to think that I could download at least another 15 or so albums before replenishing my original outlay of $10.
Overall, I'd say that All Of MP3 offers a satisfactory download experience. Its interface isn't the most intuitive, the search engine is unreliable and some of the instructions are written in very stilted English. Yet it is a world away from peer-to-peer systems like KaZaa with their flaky interfaces and files that purport to contain music but offer nothing more than bleeps.
I am sure that the site won't be around for long given that the big guns from the various record companies, copyright agencies and music download services are sure to be trained on it. And for most users too the iTunes, Connect and Napster services, when they finally launch in the UK, will more than suffice. But in the meantime All Of MP3 has found a niche.
