allflac

A quick Google gives me the strong impression that it's less than entirely legit - supposedly UK based, but probably actually Ukrainian, claiming to have proper agreements with record labels but possibly not really having them in all cases, etc. For all that, the files may be fine and they may not be risky with credit card info. It may even be the case that artists get paid properly eventually for sales on the site. Though I struggle not to doubt it.

If you want to give it a go, let us know how you get on. But I wouldn't touch it.

I wouldn't touch it. Looks like someone is selling rips of CDs in a FLAC format. No true high-resolution audio files. I checked some of the artists that I know did not issue Hi-Res albums and are only available on CDs and some that I know did release them. All of them are on this site, but in CD-quality FLAC files.

Mcafee says WHOA !!!!

Ineed - registered address in the UK, phone number for the US (mobile), actual location of the servers - somewhere in Florida.

All EU based legal entities must provide full company details, including VAT, Registration number, etc. None of this is availble on this website....

Yes I took a brief look at this site one time, and was immediately deafened by the raucous cacophony of multiple alarm bells ringing in my head.

I issued a virtual Credit Card with a small US$ limit amount to buy and download some files. I'll report later.

I bought a couple of albums (that I couldn't find elsewhere) from them last year. One downloaded fine but the other didn't show any tracks for the download but this was fixed by their support. The metadata of one of the albums was all messed up. The files are CD quality. I wouldn't use AllFlac again.

This has been around, with a few different names, for a long time.  There was (or still is) and allmp3 site too.  I believe it's (a) Russian, (b) no consent or authorization of the copyright holders, and (c) very likely upsampled lossy rips, at least in part.  I absolutely would avoid it!

Thanks everyone. It seems my instinct to avoid was correct.

Bananahead posted:

Thanks everyone. It seems my instinct to avoid was correct.

When all else fails you, go with the "when it sounds too good to be true, it likely is" rule!

I downloaded 7 albums, checked the metadata with metadatics, frequency spectrum and other recording parameters with musicscope. Less than US$ 6 avg. Listened them wiith MacBook Air/Audirvana/Hugo/HD800.

3 x cd quality: Good quality. With these downloads I also obtained mp3 and m4a.

2 x dsd 64: Good quality. Only listened to them. No musicscope analysis because I didn extracted individual tracks from the iso file.

2 x 24/96: one upsampled, one Ok.

Metadata in different styles and with different levels of completion. Not bad but need a lot of editing.

Erich posted:

I downloaded 7 albums, checked the metadata with metadatics, frequency spectrum and other recording parameters with musicscope. Less than US$ 6 avg. Listened them wiith MacBook Air/Audirvana/Hugo/HD800.

3 x cd quality: Good quality. With these downloads I also obtained mp3 and m4a.

2 x dsd 64: Good quality. Only listened to them. No musicscope analysis because I didn extracted individual tracks from the iso file.

2 x 24/96: one upsampled, one Ok.

Metadata in different styles and with different levels of completion. Not bad but need a lot of editing.

Why don't you just bittorrent -- equally pirated and you're not paying anything.  I don't know why anyone would PAY for pirated music.

The site will not load for me. A quick check (http://downoruprightnow.com/status/allflac.com) showed that it is up. I tried connecting with my VPN and got through fine. It looks like BT are blocking it.

There's a post on Whathifi forums dated 2012 asking about this site.  Looked dodgy then...

Bart posted:

Erich posted:

I downloaded 7 albums, checked the metadata with metadatics, frequency spectrum and other recording parameters with musicscope. Less than US$ 6 avg. Listened them wiith MacBook Air/Audirvana/Hugo/HD800.

3 x cd quality: Good quality. With these downloads I also obtained mp3 and m4a.

2 x dsd 64: Good quality. Only listened to them. No musicscope analysis because I didn extracted individual tracks from the iso file.

2 x 24/96: one upsampled, one Ok.

Metadata in different styles and with different levels of completion. Not bad but need a lot of editing.

Why don't you just bittorrent -- equally pirated and you're not paying anything.  I don't know why anyone would PAY for pirated music.

Agreed, although I would take it a step further and say I don't know why anyone would pirate music at all.

Usually because they either don't recognise that it's stealing someone else's life's work or they just don't care about that (or, rarely, they unwittingly obtain it from a source that doesn't pass on royalties).

One band's work I'm completely OK with duplicating and sharing is Hungry Lucy - they licence their work under the Creative Commons Attribution Share Alike licence (CC BY-SA).  They're one of a tiny number of artist who encourage sharing of their work for free.  Even then I chose to pay them for the copies I listen too regularly.
N.B. the attribution and passing on the licence (share left) is vitally important.

Also (per Adam)  registered address in the UK, phone number for the US (mobile), actual location of the servers - somewhere in Florida.    I'm wondering if this infringes those infuriating USA/EU regional restrictions.  (???)

Mike-B posted:

Also (per Adam)  registered address in the UK, phone number for the US (mobile), actual location of the servers - somewhere in Florida.    I'm wondering if this infringes those infuriating USA/EU regional restrictions.  (???)

Actually it would... mostly from a Personal Data Protection point of view. For now, US is still not really recognised by the EU as a providing adequate personal data protection levels.
Under the new EU resolution on the data protection (passed in May 2016 and coming into force in early 2018) this will be even stricter.

I suggest that the owners of the site may consider it to be a virtual organisation operating wholly and solely within the jurisdiction of the internet.  If this is so, then they need to consider some of the national and international views of jurisprudence (e.g. US, UK, EU).

Possibly....

Nevertheless the jurisdiction is still determined by the registered  / legal seat of the entity. Here it's the UK - so the company is bound by the UK / EU legislation. 
For a website operating in the EU, there are some glaring omissions which rang my alarm bells immediately..

Adam, that's exactly the UK and EU's view on jurisprudence (at least for that specific issue).  That brings the operators of the site under UK / EU jurisdiction (but it probably wouldn't be extraditable for the majority of countries of the world outside of the the EU (and possibly EFTA - I don't know the details of the treaties).

All the legal points aside it makes me wonder what kind of internet security some forumites have & what level of risk they are willing to take,  or is it that they are unaware of the risk,  don't have good security or just don't care.    My McAfee point blank refuses to open it, it first pops up the "WHOA" message,  then if you choose to go on it gives a further malware warning & the next step blocks content.    

My ISP (usually) blocks access.

Via one access route it didn't (a link from outside), then Kaspersky allowed some partial loading of content (simple HTML formatted text only) and blocked & warned of other content.

Maybe just me, but isn't it a bit iffy to allow the 'What have you downloaded and in what format?' thread to show endless entries highlighting downloads from allflac, including what are clearly SACD rips?

+1,  plus the endless everything in the music section is all in need of a rethink.