Amazon MP3 store – buying MP3s legitimately online in Linux still a pain in the arse then
Like many this Christmas, I found Amazon’s offer of £3 of free MP3s tempting. I’ve avoided buying music online all these years on principle because the DRM experience mixed with using multiple computers and OS types has just been miserable. The CD has generally been cheaper, with the very minor inconvenience of ripping it when it first arrives to a nice high bitrate play-anywhere set of files.
So, like a mug off I merrily go to order my MP3s of choice, supposedly free of DRM or any other BS. However, once you get through the ordering process, you’ll find that some BS has persisted. If you have ordered more than one track you are not served a direct download of each track, or a zip of everything you have ordered. You are prompted to download an app with the promise that it’ll add the tracks to your iTunes or Windows Media Player collection. Grand and all that, if you actually use either of these apps, which on windows I don’t. Alarm bells ring.
Still, there are download links for a variety of Linux flavours, so I give it a whirl. The download for OpenSuse 11 doesn’t work immediately on 11.1 due to missing dependancies, no biggy there we’ll just make sure the correct libs are installed for that architecture via the package manager. After some messing around and a little searching it turns out the app has never installed properly
To be fair, fire up Windows in a VM and the little app installs without issue, however by default it still tries to insert every track into Windows Media Player, which if you’ve not clicked through the setup wizard for media player will result in a prompt for every single track.
On one hand the app is quite neat, you get served a little file which presumeably has information about which tracks to fetch encrypted within it and off it goes and grabs them. Unfortunately it’s just unnecessary, an online store should not need a helper app to serve unprotected DRM free MP3 files and if you are going to make a helper app compulsory, at least make sure it works. Oh, and if you’re going to serve a little encrypted file people might not know what to do with instead of a music download, make sure it can be redownloaded easily from the order history (I couldn’t find an option to re-download at all, but had saved the original file).
Back to ordering CD’s and ripping them it is.
Still, “And all that could have been” was worth the trouble. (Note, fan made video below includes stuff you might not want to see etc etc…)
