foryourears.com review
foryourears.com website
| foryourears.com | Site up since June 2004 |
I think this is the first Finnish entry to the non-rights managed music download business. And that is a good thing, although all releases in their catalog fit on one not too long web page.
The music is encoded in constant bitrate MP3 format which they call CD quality
on their site. Might be CD quality for some, but for the real compression algorithm connoiseur the encoding should be at least variable bitrate. Seriously, for some tracks non-variable bitrate 192 Kbps might not be enough to play loud in a club, and electronic music is the game at foryourears.com.
| Format | Quality | Price |
|---|---|---|
| MP3 | 192 Kbps | €0.99 with strange discounts on full releases, eg. €3.40 for 4 tracks |
Previews are 1 minute in both streaming and downloadable MP3 formats encoded at 96 Kbps.
The site looks simple, but looks can be deceiving. Foryourears.com is quite easy to use when you find the slightly confusingly worded Add release
[to basket] link among all the text. Speaking of text and usability, light grey text on mid grey background is probably the worst choice of colors among all the sites reviewed here. I hear the design nerds start whining again, but if you had a choice of either giving eye strain to your bad sighted customers or not giving eye strain to them, what would you choose? It's good that the Shopping Basket is visible at all times, but here it's done with frames which makes bookmarking of individual pages impossible. Help is readily available in the site dropdown menu. I'm left wondering how well this site would scale when more catalog gets added.
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