It made some headlines, and is about to make more during superbowl. Amazon has started selling mp3's from all four of the major record labels. It's a pretty cool revelation, so I went ahead and checked it out.
Guess what? Linux users, you are screwed. In order to download albums from Amazon, you must "Get the Amazon mp3 downloader"...which is not available for Linux. Excuse me? Say what? I have downloaded literally hundreds upon hundreds of files from the Internet, and never have I needed a special tool other than Firefox. Why now?
Amazon, if you're going to do something great like this, do it whole hog. Don't make me install junkware. After all, I'm choosing to give you money, right?
Linux users are not entirely left in the dark, at least thats what there saying.
There is a Linux client supposedly in the works http://www.amazon.com/gp/help/customer/display.html?nodeId=200154260&#re...
However I'm not putting much faith in there "promise" (If you will)
Now I will agree with you about the downloader, having to isntall a client to download music is a pain and should not be required!
Yeah, I saw that after I posted this, but these windows to Linux ports are usually some of the worst software ever. For example, I installed Picasa a while back, and it created a My Pictures folder in my home directory to mimic Windows. Not so fun, when I ought to be able to just configure such things.
I did go ahead and install the Amazon Downloader in my Windows XP virtual machine, and was able to configure it to download files to my Ubuntu desktop, so that works, but to boot XP in order to download files? Not cool.
Oh a little update, not sure if you have heard anything about it, but amazon has a closed beta going on.
I emailed them asking about the status of the client and they asked me if I would like to help test it out.
So far I haven't detected any problems with the Linux client, it does exactly what it's supposed to do and doesn't seem to have any bugs.
I would think they they should be releasing the client publicly any time now, but in case you want it now, you could probably email them and ask to get a hold of the beta, I would gladly share my copy, but the asked that I not do that :\
You can see my post about it with the email address you can contact them at here:
http://abadtooths.com/2008/02/08/linux-mp3-downloader-review/
I must admit it's nice to see them making good on their Linux promise, but I have to admit I'm still pretty annoyed about it. I really don't want another little helper app on my computer, and that is really all it amounts to unless I am missing some piece of the puzzle here.
My perspective is that I should be able to click on a link, and have the download begin. No extra steps, software, DRM, encumberances necessary.
Pretty annoying really.
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