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Unlike similar music stores such as Apple's iTunes Music Store, AllOfMP3.com charges for the volume of data downloaded, not for individual songs. As of April 2004, the price for one gigabyte of downloaded music or video is 10 United States dollars. At a bitrate of 128 kbit/s, this equals about 18 hours of audio, a price with which few other legal services can compete.
The website offers a Russian and English user interface. Most functions are only accessible to registered users. Registration itself is free. The store maintains an account balance for each user. The account can be replenished using various payment methods, including PayPal, so that no credit card information has to be revealed to the company. While the user has a positive balance, they can continue downloading music and videos. To do so, they select the files they are interested in from the store's catalog. AllofMP3.com seems to have frequent problems supporting PayPal, and today only provides PayPal services indirectly through prepayment cards offered by XRost.com.
The user can choose from a variety of audio codecs for audio files, including MP3 and Ogg Vorbis, and, for some files, lossless audio codec s. The user can set the codec parameters, including the desired bitrate. The audio files are then encoded and added to the user's download list. In some cases, the user will have to wait until the files are encoded. They can then be downloaded using a web browser, a Microsoft WindowsImage use policy. Microsoft Windows is a range of commercial operating environments for personal computers. The range was first introduced by Microsoft in 1985 and eventually has come to dominate the world personal computer market. All recent versions of application called "Allofmp3 Explorer", a download managerA download manager is a program designed to download files from the Internet, unlike a web browser, which is mainly intended to browse pages on the WWW (with file downloading being of secondary importance). A download manager is also designed to download, or command-line utilities like wgetWget is a GNU free software tool that permits advanced file retrieval from networks and the Internet. For example, it allows for simplified mirroring and recursive downloading. Its name is derived from World Wide Web and GET which is the name of the comma (the "My Downloads" list offers a "list of links" which can be written to a file and used as input for such tools).
The files are unrestricted, i.e. they do not contain digital rights managementDigital Rights Management or Digital Restrictions Management DRM is an umbrella term for any of several arrangements which allows a vendor of content in electronic form to control the material and restrict its usage in various ways that can be specified b information. The website also offers free, full-length samples of all songs at a bitrate of 24 kbit/s (roughly equivalent to analog telephoneThe telephone or phone is a telecommunications device that transmits speech by means of electric signals. Generally attributed to the inventor Alexander Graham Bell, the first was built in Boston, Massachusetts, in 1876. However, an Italian inventor Anton audio quality).
As of 2004, the website occasionally delays front-end requests because of high server load; backend requests such as downloads, however, are not delayed, and download speeds are usually high.