Legal Downloads (part 2): Allofmp3

Well, it seems there's one decent legal music download source. The slightly insanely named Allofmp3.com is a Russian-based music download site that will happily supply to anyone in the world. It's legal - the payments go through the Russian copyright people (apparently they do exist!) - and they get it right.

No manky DRM and exclusive reliance on Windows Media Player files here. In a lot of cases you can choose exactly what sort of file you get - MP3, WMA, OGG Vorbis (hooray!) - and even the handful of available lossless formats (including, incredibly, WAV files) - and what bitrate you want them at. An impressive number of tracks are available to be encoded on-the-fly to your prefered format. Genius! No restrictions on what you do with them once you've got them either - unlike all the other download services, you really do get what you pay for. In fact, you pay for bandwidth more than anything else. $5 gets you 500Mb, which is an absolute bargain.

Best of all, there's a fair amount of free downloads on the service as well. I've got some Massive Attack downloading as we speak - 128kbit MP3s, but hey - it's free. AND LEGIT!

And it doesn't rely on Windows. I can browse, buy and listen on a Linux box. Ace.

ALLOFMP3