Bottom Line:
MP3fiesta will always be a favourite among the aom3 community. Being the 2nd cheapest music store on the net, it offers a quality solid service with decent payment options for refilling your balance. With support by your side when you need the extra assistance, you’ll find yourself wanting more and praying that
MP3fiesta will not stop here and continue to update their program and interface.
Background Info
MP3fiesta is run by a small company based in Russia. It is new kid compared to other established music stores. They are licensed by ROMS to sell music. Their favourite visitors is USA and then Russia by second. So it is still working towards becoming UK’s favourite.
User Interface
MP3fiesta has gone for a different style, very light and easy on the eyes, making the content stand out from its surroundings. Front page is nicely done, with all sections clearly shown. They have managed to pack a lot of needed information in a limited amount of space without feeling cramped, which always makes a good impression among first visitors.
Browsing artists by alphabetical is nothing too complicated, but a little tip for saving time on having to scan through to find your artists, would be to use your browsers ‘search’ function. It can speed things up a lot.
Viewing an album again is nothing too hard. Everything is displayed nicely; all tracks are shown with options by the side. They have a recommendation column for similar artists. And above they have other albums under the artist you are currently looking. While it doesn’t show as much information as
musicmp3, its ideal for the casual music shopper.
The whole feel is very open spaced with
MP3fiesta, which will please many users, they could use some of this wasted to display additional information, such as company news, music reviews etc.. It’s a suggestion rather than a criticism that can be easily be implemented.
Catalogue
MP3Fiesta offers a very extensive range of music, with ‘60 albums’ added daily. I was able to find many artists I couldn’t find anywhere else and its good to know there is a music shop which caters to all ends of the spectrum rather than just mainstream music.
However doing some research on their catalogue, I find that out of the sample I took, they were lacking albums of live shows. Again, the same I took isn’t big enough to represent the whole database, so doing a quick search for yourself will answer your question
Pricing
The pricing is a fantastic feature of
MP3fiesta. With an average set price of $0.10 per track, it is very possible to find albums for $1. Sounds crazy eh? Even crazier when you find tracks that contain multiple songs in itself, more bang for your buck.
Audio Formats
All tracks come in MP3 format. You will find varying albums with different bit rates. Some albums will have a bit-rate of 192 Kbps and some will have 320kbps. So it will be like dipping your hand in a lucky bag to find out what bit-rate you’ll be getting. There are no restrictions or copyright protections on the tracks, so you are free to copy the songs to as many devices as you want.
(you see, I am capable of writing a review without moaning about the absence of multi-format downloading
...)
Downloading
There is no downloading app available with
MP3fiesta, but you can use a download manager with your browser, and you will be set for life. If you are using FireFox, check out our music download guide which aims to make download multiple tracks a breeze. As all download links are present on one page, it is very easy to download all tracks at a time. Of course having to set up a download manager for the first time can be a hassle, but it seems to be a standard at the moment.
MP3fiesta can make it easier for us by developing a small program similar to
legalsounds and alltunes to download music.
Payment Options
Refilling your balance is such a breeze compared to allofmp3 (yes yes i know they are in completely different situations). Even though
MP3Fiesta states on their front page they use chronopay ,they in fact use SWREG at the time this review was written.
SWERG is owned by an American company but is very popular by European merchants. As SWERG is the chosen payment processor, its possible to use a variety of payment methods, ranging from;
- CREDIT CARD online now (no processing fee except for Diners Club + 4%)
- PAYPAL in USD Only (+ GBP 1.85 manual processing fee)
- CREDIT CARD by FAX (+ GBP 1.58 manual processing fee)
- CREDIT CARD by PHONE (+ GBP 1.58 manual processing fee)
- BACS with Proforma Invoice*
- WIRE TRANSFER with Proforma Invoice (+ GBP 9.51 manual processing fee)*
- CHECK/CHEQUE with Proforma Invoice - US or UK only (+ GBP 1.58 manual processing fee)*
So it’s unlikely you’ll be stuck to find a way to refill your balance. However I have a feeling this new found glory won’t last for long. It would be nice though if
MP3fiesta could list on the refill page the additional fees that are included in each payment method available.
Additional Notes
Before conducting this review I wanted to see what the uptime of
MP3Fiesta was like. So for a week I used siteuptime to monitor its uptime. Result:
MP3fiesta had 100% uptime, of course 1 week is not large enough for a sample, but does give you some idea how rock solid this service is. I will continue to keep siteuptime experiment going for a year and see what the final report is.
Conclusion
I now understand why
MP3fiesta is such a popular choice among the aom3 community. Its hard to find faults with
MP3fiesta, but there are many things they can do to improve their service. I will stand by
MP3Fiesta as my one of my personal favourite alternatives and 100% recommend it to anyone to try.
Price – 98%
Payment Options – 92%
User Interface – 89%
Audio Formats – 89%
92% - Editors Choice
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Blocked by your ISP -
12-01-2007, 02:13 PM
It loads as fast as ever...
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