All of MP3 Downloader Update

Contrary to popular demand, I have decided to write some more about my “All of MP3” downloader script. You may be wondering why I think this is important enough to write about twice in one week; The same week that the corrupt Bush administration may see a key administrator prosecuted; A week in which my favourite Blogger has once again been slandered, and many other newsworthy things have occurred. Why then am I writing about an obscure script designed to download music from a Russian online music store?

For starters, some background: “All Of MP3” is like Napster, iTunes Music Store and Rhapsody a web-site on the internet where you can buy music. It serves the same purpose as a high-street CD store only instead of bringing home plastic disks, we download music files directly onto our computers. In this shared principle, all the stores I listed work in approximately the same way, however the differences are apparent on further scrutiny.

Most music stores exist with permission of the various record companies. In order to appease the slow-moving executives of the recording industry they have been forced to do three annoying things:
Firstly they sell their music at approximately the same price as a high street store: About $1 or £1 per track. A typical album will cost more than $10 which is not much of a saving compared to buying plastic.
Secondly the big-name online music stores encumber their downloads with DRM; Digital Rights Management is a technology designed to download customers of their rights. For example a music file that contains DRM may have unusual restrictions: You might not be able to copy it from one computer to another. It may be impossible to write it to a CD so you can hear it in a car. One day it might stop working altogether, and your music collection will be completely useless.

Finally, the stores each have their own proprietary formats. For example iTunes only sells music in Apple AAC format. Napster only deals in Microsoft Media files. The upshot of this is that each store sells files that are unplayable on the other store’s software. One may wonder why each company is tied to a proprietary file format when there are so many open and universally supported formats to choose from: The answer is that they hope to keep customers prisoner by locking their music-collections into their technologies.

Strange to think that a DRM music file in a locked, proprietary format is worth a lot less than a DRM-free CD, and yet sells for approximately the same price as a track on an Audio CD.

So what is so different about All of Mp3? For starters, they are a Russian company. That means they sell music at Russian prices, which are ten times cheaper than the cheapest American or European music store. All of their files are DRM free, which means they can be played without restrictions. Best of all, their music is offered in every major audio format. This means downloads from All of MP3 can be played on every known audio player and all computer operating systems.

Until recently, there was one snag: The software provided by All of MP3 to download the bought music was Windows only; It seems strange that they would go to such lengths to make a cross-platform music shop and then only offer a Windows based download client, but that is exactly what they did.
Until recently, Mac and Linux users like myself had to run a Windows emulator in order to run the download application and get our music; well that was what we had to do until a blogger called blogger called r00tshell hacked together a simple python script for downloading the music.

Recently I took r00tshell’s code and tidied it up a bit. I made it more extendable and gave it the ability to download multiple files at once. And now, under the terms of the GPL, I have released the source code for my improved software so that other users can benefit from it.