First of all, they don’t have every MP3. I don’t care what they say. I don’t even know if they say it… but ya know… given the name.
Anyway. Who they are, are a Russian outfit that sells MP3 by the pound megabyte.
No, really. It’s like a butcher shop, except the sides of beef are albums. You tell the man with the heavy accent at the counter what you want, he takes it off the hook, chops off the tracks you want, packages them how you like (format, bit rate, what have you… 192 kbps, Ogg format, please), he slaps it on the scale and you pay two cents for every megabyte.
I just got Gorillaz’ “Feel Good Inc.”. Cost me ten cents for the five meg file.
They do want your payment info. And I dunno about you, but the prospect of sending my credit card info to Russia causes me a little hesitation. My credit card company, though, offers virtual credit card numbers – one-use credit card info; never works again.
Worked fine in Linux, so I got my temporary CC number, prepaid ten bucks which is about hmm a hundred tracks at that high quality. Lessee. Ten bucks on iTunes = ten songs. AllofMP3.com = a hundred songs.
Is this legal? Well, it’s legal in Russia… is it legal for me to buy it? Why not? I paid for it. If the RIAA wants to talk with them, they probably should. But I was legit. Money changed hands.
And anyway, since I don’t have an iPod, iTunes doesn’t do a lot for me. I don’t know if ANY DRM-using media store works on my Rio. AllofMP3.com does.
Songbird, the iTunes workalike from the people behind Firefox and Thunderbird, promises to at least give me a nice interface to a lot of online stores that do support non-iPods…. but it doesn’t work on Linux (yet, it is in the works…)
I’m sorry, software providers. I watch movies on Linux; I listen to music on Linux. If you want my content-protected media bucks, you will get your software working on Linux.
Ah well. You know this is just delaying the inevitable. Back to work on tonight’s project. You’ll see it here before anyone else. If I can stop fiddling with Baphomet and my blog.
