Weird. Paypal is enabled for me. I just sent $50 yesterday, and it still shows as an option as of 5 min ago.

They now have a discount program too:

They offer 5 lossess formats, all of which are based on an industry standard codec:

Monkey's Audio Lossless
OptimFROG Lossless
FLAC Lossless
PCM Wave
WMA 9 Lossless

Most computer based players out there will understand these formats (usually thru a plugin). You'll have less luck with portable players.

I currently use flac. (I'm re-ripping everything I own into flac, and then create whatever I need at the momentm, while keeping the flac file around.)

Thanks for the info. flac is perfect for me. Perusing their site, it seemed to me that they had their own lossless format.

-David

I use this site all of the time because fo the low cost and the fast downloads. You get to pick the compression format you prefer and they have a ton of songs. Who cares if the site is in Russia? Most people don't even know where most servers are that they transact on anyway.

i really don't know of any cheaper similar sites, unless you want to use bit torrents which is cool but takes forever to get the downloads you want.

BTW- I can care less about all that copyright stuff or the record companies getting every penny of a royalty.
Before Napster i was getting a ton of music through the bulletin boards and MIRC. Who the heck wants to pay $15 for a CD of 15 songs and 10 of them are crappy?
Also spending $1 a song for a crippled Itune is complete nonsense. You have to be insane to spend $1 for a poor quality piece of data that restricts how u can use it. I would spend the $1 on a completely lossless format, that I have complete use of but your talking +20mb of pure CD quality.

I get a good chuckle when my Ipod using Itune loving friends gush about the product they use. They don't even realize they are getting ripped off 2x-once for the HD player and twice for the music. I have owned Apple stock for 3 years now so I really do get a good laugh out of it.

I have had no problem with the Allofmp3.com site. I have downloaded about 150 songs. I think I have spent $16. It is a great deal. There is a larger selection of foreign music. I downloaded some French stuff to remind me of my mis-spent youth!
As I understand it the artists get something. To be truthful, a lot of the stuff I download is music I used to own but lost due to breakups, moves etc. I guess I am rationalizing, but so be it.

The Wall Street Journal has an article on Russian music sites. Here are some relevant excerpts:

"...lawyers say buying music from the sites is as illegal as downloading it for free over a file-swapping network. "It doesn't matter if somebody downloads in the U.S. and believes that it's legal because the site tells them so," says Evan Cox, an intellectual property lawyer at the firm Covington & Burling in San Francisco.

...

The sites offer several advantages, aside from price, over their U.S. counterparts. Most allow users to preview an entire song, compared with the 30-second clips on iTunes. Files can be downloaded in several formats (most U.S. sites serve up a single format) and the files have no built-in restrictions on how they can be used or copied once downloaded. Some sites let users download files encoded at much higher quality than U.S. services offer.

...

The site obtains the music it sells by purchasing CDs in retail stores, he said, and receives some albums directly from record labels. He said the site pays licensing fees for the music it sells to a group called the Russian Organization for Multimedia & Digital Systems, or ROMS, which purports to represent Russian copyright holders. MP3search.ru and 3MP3.ru also say on their Web sites that they are licensed by ROMS.

Konstantin Leontiev, deputy director general for legal issues of ROMS, said in an e-mail statement that the group acts "in conformity with the requirements of the Russian laws." He said that the group's activities only cover users inside Russia, and said users outside Russia should consult local laws. He didn't respond to further questions.

...

Going after users of the services could be difficult. "You'd have to subpoena the sites to get their records, and if they're operated out of Russia, it may not be such an easy task," says Michael S. Poster, a corporate and entertainment lawyer at Katten Muchin Zavis Rosenman in New York.

...

Some users of the Russian sites complain in online forums about incomplete albums, poor customer service and slow downloads. One user on iPodLounge shared worries about handing over a credit card number to a Russian company -- some of the sites, including AllofMP3.com, require users to register and "fund" their accounts before they can buy songs.

AllofMP3.com once accepted payments through PayPal, but PayPal shut the company's account down after receiving reports that it sold unauthorized music, says Sara Bettencourt, a spokesperson for PayPal, a division of eBay Inc."

You can read the full article here. [paid subscription required].

The truth is that Allofmp3 offers a better product than itunes and all of the others. Face it you get fast downloads, you pay by the mb and you get to choose the compression format and quality of the song you want. Which do u prefer? 1 crappy Itunes song with a crappy encoded format with limited use for a $1 or an entire album in the format of your choice for $2 ?

I finally installed the Allofmp3 Explorer and loaded a $30 Xrost gift card (which you pay using PayPal). In addition, you get a 10% bonus for loading your account with the gift card, so I got $33.00 (plus the $0.20 registration bonus). I downloaded just over 950mb of music (all done off-and-on yesterday afternoon and evening) for a shade under $20. Great deal, IMO. :)

Allofmp3 just got better...

www.alltunes.com

Since they are still around, and that I haven't heard they are going to be shutdown I am confident I am fine downloading all I want. Why pay $9.99 for an iTMS album, when I can download the same album from them, in the format I want, without DRM for a fraction of the price.

So alltunes replaces the existing AllofMP3 Explorer?

Not sure it replaced it, but it is much better, and much faster. Finding new albums just got much easier.

To support the artists that made the music you're enjoying?

Bah. You support the artists you like by going to their shows, buying their t-shirts, etc. The record execs./labels are making a killing and artists never see their fair share of it.

That said, I buy albums of my favorite bands at their shows. I know all the profit goes to them, and it's usually a few bucks cheaper.

I'm an allofmp3.com fan here, but you do have to realize that it's not really completely legal, it's a gray area. I pay for the quality (the custom audio quality selection is great) and for the ease of having it all in one location, and the speed.

Having seen several episodes of "MTV Cribs", I am convinced they don't need my support.

Many of the smaller bands are not on "Allofmp3", so I'll still be buying some plastic.

As noble as your statement is, money talks. Do you pick the more expensive stores for your CD's? Or make sure to never buy a CD when it is on sale?