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As a newly introduced music download service, MP3va offers a similar experience as other music sites with a familiar feel and easy site navigation. MP3va accepts Credit Cards (Visa/Visa Electron, Mastercard), Paypal, Maestro, and SMS as payment options and offers 20% discounts on entire album purchases, as well as payment bonuses that can mean prices effectively as low as $0.07 per track.

The large bonuses offered seem to be a good incentive for using MP3va. For example, an initial deposit of $50 in your account will get you a bonus $50 - which essentially halves the price of your tracks (or doubles the number of tracks you can download, depending on how you like to look at it). A $100 deposit is even better - you get a $120 bonus added to your account, meaning you can download a whopping 1,466 tracks. Of course, entire album downloads (with an additional 20% discount) means that you'll make out even better if you choose whole albums over individual tracks.

The catalog has over 1 million tracks (over 100,000 albums), so it easily has a large enough catalog to compete with the other top music stores. They carry most mainstream music at varying bitrates - with most of the tracks in the 192kbps-320kbps range. However, there are some albums and tracks that are only available at lower bitrates (128-160kbps), but they are the minority on the site. Downloads are very fast, with speeds of at least 200kb/s or faster (or about 20 seconds per song, depending on the file size).

A note to new users of MP3va: sometimes there are multiple versions of the same album available with the only obvious difference being the bitrate. For example, the Metallica album 'St. Anger' has two versions, both with the same price - but the first one is encoded at 220kbps and the second at 320kbps (see them here and here). Since the prices are the same, make sure you check that you're downloading the album with the higher bitrate if that is what you prefer.

The control panel (shown above) has a 'Music Request' form that allows you to easily send your own request to the site if you want something that isn't in their catalog. Your purchased music can be re-downloaded by visiting the 'Downloads' area at any time, which is also a nice convenience. The format of the filenames can be specified under "Profile" as well, which will be handy for those that want their files to follow a specific naming convention (Artist_album_trackname.mp3, for example).

Payment options at MP3va include VISA & Visa Electron, MasterCard, PayPal, and SMS (mobile phone). They use three different payment gateways for credit cards: www.plimus.com, www.istbill.com, and www.webtopay.com. They currently accept PayPal, as well as SMS payments through www.onebip.com . The site suggests that there is support for several languages, but at the moment it appears that only English is implemented.

Features Matrix

This table illustrates the features offered by MP3va. Please make sure to check the comparison matrix for a side-by-side comparison of all of the sites reviewed at SongBoom.com!