purevolume™ (strictly always with that “™” note there) is once again a music website, with a few community features, so that they won’t be labeled a “den of copyright infringement”, in other words: an mp3 download site. You know, i’m not that very social kind of guy, who joins a web community and goes woot posting his stuff everywhere, commenting, rating and such. I have to be very dedicated to do that, and in this case, i am definitely not. Still, this purevolume impressed me at first: it has info and even music of the japanese punk band Samurai Attack (actually that’s how i found the site on Google), which indicates this is something serious. But this site’s not perfect either–on a perfect site of this kind, i could find any music i happened to look for–since i couldn’t listen to a second of Paradise Lost material. Furthermore, larger (and even better known) bands, such as Nightwish are also hard to find, or are not present at all, or (what’s even worse) fake ones are there, which is a huge problem–i think it’s due to the open registration of the artists. The site design is simple and nice, i like it, even though for some it may be a bit too simple, but at least it has hardly any flash (only the media player and some ad animations, as far as i’ve seen), unlike Deezer. From the developer point of view, the links and urls, and thus the site is quite easy to break, so for example if you take that link below to my user profile, and remove “home” from the end, it’ll return an error, even though it should still make sense (in my opinion, such urls should work even when pieces are removed one after another). The gig locator feature doesn’t seem to work outside of the States at all either. Why are all such sites like they were just opened yesterday–this one has to grow a lot too. Anyway, i joined today, so add me as a friend, if you’re there too.

I’ve read about this service at mandark, and checked it out almost immediately–now after having tried it out, having built a playlist and such, i now write my first impressions. The very first impression was “man, they don’t know of UTF-8?”, because the hungarian interface (to which it automatically switched for me) is a tragedy. The translations are not bad, but the absolutely Flash-based interface simply doesn’t display characters like “ő” or “ű”, and it has problems with the simpler ones too (i know tried out the chinese one too, and that’s even more hopeless: all texts are “undefined”, and no chinese characters show up, though the service remains usable, if you know which button is what). The system was not easy to get used to at first, probably because this language problem–but one i switched to english, it all became a lot easier. Deezer is a community site, so you can add friends and all that stuff, though naturally the main point is not this, at least i have the feeling that nowadays all these sites launch as “community sites” to have some success (understandably).