mp3 Fiesta: Follow Up

A few weeks back, I did a post on mp3 Fiesta, a music download site that is extremely inexpensive, but legal. I have used it a little and would like to review it and address some issues I had with it. I am not going over an old idea because I am out of ideas, just as a follow up... don't worry, my ideas are endless.

Browsing/searching: searching for albums and bands is really quite simple. Just a matter of normal browsing and/or searching. They had everything I was looking for and I think you would be hard pressed to think of a band that they don't have. They, no doubt, have more selection than iTunes, however, they don't have albums with the bonus features that iTunes offers. Sometimes the search feature won't return a band that you typed in. Don't depend solely on this feature as the browse artist link, although more complex, is much more comprehensive (in fact, I typed "led zepplin" into the search field and it didn't return what I wanted. I was worried so I looked under browse artist and I found that they have 43 albums. The problem as you may well have noticed is that I misspelled zeppelin. The search engine does not compensate for such human errors).

No DRM: there is absolutely no digital rights management. That means you can pretty much use the files anywhere you want. You can put them in iTunes, on your iPod, Zune (heaven forbid), or whatever, burn it to a disk, put it on a thumb and share it with friends, you name it, you can do it.

Payment: this was one of the issues I found. I found it to be quite simple, besides a little trick part. You can "load" your account with money from any credit card or bank card (Visa and Mastercard only). In the first step, you give your name, address, phone number, and card type. No card number yet. Then you click "confirm payment" and it goes to another secure page where you input your other information (i.e. card, security code, etc). The issue I had with this process was that 3 out of the 5 times I tried, the site didn't connect me with the confirmation page where I input the card number. Weird. The site may have been having problems because it did work two of the other times. The only other issue here is that you cannot determine the amount you load besides the 5 given options ($19.90, $29.90, $39.90, $49.90, and $99.90).

Downloading: after finding what you want, the download link is simple and you simply confirm you want to download a song and it goes to your download page (part of your account). The cool thing here is that the downloads are available for 48 hours after point of purchase. You can also share your downloads with trusted friends and family from this point as the files can be downloaded as many times as you want within 48 hours. THE PROBLEM: the download process is painstaking. Rediculously painstaking. You have to right click (no left clicking, or else) and select "save target as" and individually save each file to a specific spot on your hard drive. Annoying... aggravatingly so.

All in all, the site is great. The price makes the downloading hassle worth it. I got around 5 albums for 10 bucks. Thats great! I give the site an 8 out of 10, points off for some of the hassle and confusing/restricting payment process.