Ted::Blogs(): Music::Allofmp3 Revisited

April 2006

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Death Valley 2006

During the Easter weekend, I took a long-deserved photo trip to my favorite place in the world, Death Valley. For the past couple of months, we've been having too much rain and it was great to get out in the sun again. I've been to Death Valley a couple of times before, and this time I tried to visit new places. This time I visited: Rhyolite, Stonepipe Wells, The Dunes (I can't remember the name right now), Golden Canyon, Artist's Pallette, Devil's Golf Course, Badwater, and Zabrieskie's Point. I took two bodies - Hasselblad 503CW (with 3 lenses) and Hasselblad SWC/M. I used Kodak TMX for 503CW with a tripod and Kodak TMY for the SWC/M handheld.

I have always been fascinated by selective focusing and shallow depth of field. To me, it is an explicit way to express the most important part of the image. For the same reason, I enjoy using vignetting as a visual effect. The series of pictures here are taken from various places including italy and california. Obviously, they are grouped as a series as they share the same type of visual effects, not because they share the same subject or geographic location.

I was born in the year of the horse. Maybe that's why I am fascinated with horses. When I started photography, I was very inspired by Keith Carter (another reason why I am so obsessed with selective focusing). After buying his book, "Ezekiel's Horse", I always wanted to have a chance to take pictures of this beautiful creature. Last year, I went to Vegas with my friends, and instead of playing golf, I drove out to Death Valley. I had the slightest idea that I would have an encounter these beautiful horses.

If it's too good to be true, there must be something wrong with it. I've bought about two dozens of albums at allofmp3.com (here is the link to my previous article) in the past couple of weeks and I am, in general, happy about it. They're dirt cheap, great quality, no DRM and have huge selections. Can't really complain. But I'm about to.

The payment system

Being a Russian company, allofmp3 provides an anonymous payment method called XROST (which lets you pay via paypal) to ease the mind of security-paranoid american users. For the first several times, it worked well, but recently they were moving their payment provider and I was forced to use their credit card payment system called Chronopay. (Now you can use CMPASS to buy an iCard which is the same as XROST and even shares the same account) When I tried to use it, I was able to make the payment but I couldn't get the pin-code (that's not good, huh?), which is required to refill your allofmp3 balance. I've sent numerous complaints to allofmp3, but haven't heard back from them yet.

Downloading music

There are three ways to download music today. If you purchased the music via their web interface, you will be sent the links of the files to download via email and you have the option to download it in your 'My Downloads' section on their website. In this case, I strongly recommend using a downloading agent like, Reget, Go!Zilla, FlashGet, GetRight, or NetVampire. The second download option is to use the "allofmp3 explorer". This is a windows client that lets you search, browse, purchase and download music. It's not as fancy as iTunes, but still works pretty well. The last option is to use their 'AllTunes' application. This is another windows client that does pretty much everything that allofmp3 explorer does. I am guessing that they are replacing their explorer with this new application.

The big problem is that their download service is quite unstable sometimes. When I was downloading The Flaming Lips album which consists of 56 songs, almost half of the songs couldn't be downloaded at the first try. I was expecting to be able to download again, but the links just disappeared as if they were downloaded successfully. Their FAQ states that, in such cases, you should just repurchase the songs and you won't be double-charged. So I did so, and I had to do this many times because some songs were keep failing at the end of the download process. Then I noticed that my balance was keep shrinking. So I checked my download history and found that they were charging me all along! I sent several complaints via their 'assistance' page, and I got the reimbursement the next day (whew!). I'm glad that they responded, but this just should never have happened in the first place. I still have this problem once in a while and now I have decided to only download the songs in a stable networking environment.

Is this really legal?

When I first heard about this site at the TWIT podcast, I was very excited to hear that this is actually legal. It is said that they are taking advantage of the loophole in the copyright law, but it is still legal. But today, in this week's TWIT, they were talking about this site again and this time they were saying that it is an illegal service. Even the Russian government declared them to be illegal.

These three issues really made me think again whether I should be using this service. Until I figure out, maybe I should check out emusic, which seems to provide DRM-free music at low cost ($.25 per song).