Just discovered trying to buy a mp3 from amazon.co.uk that they actually got a native linux downloader for their music available. I guess for most this is old news, but to me it came as a positive surprise to see this pop up on my system:
Amazon MP3 downloader
Now if only Amazon would dare be the first mainstream music store to start offering their music in Vorbis format :)
Now if this were a Banshee/Rhythmbox/Amarok plugin…
I wouldn’t be surprised if the relevant mp3 patents expire before resellers such as Amazon starts to care about Vorbis. Flac on the OTOH might be a sane choice in the not too distant future though.
Can the amazon.co.uk service be used in other countries e.g. germany? The german amazon still doesn’t seem to offer this :(
Shame it isn’t an open source downloader too. Someone has even written an open source command line downloader called clamz – http://code.google.com/p/clamz/ – it seems to work quite well here on my 64 bit system with the US Amazon service.
Isn’t the downloader only available for Ubuntu, Fedora and OpenSuse?
I’m using Debian Lenny and couldn’t get it to work.
Not so much a fault of amazon but of the general suckage of linux packages.
Would be nice if they would update it. I was able to run it on Ubuntu 8.04 but for a ‘novice’ I was not able to get it installed on Fedora 9.
Vorbis? No, Vorbis is wonderful for portable devices, not for buying music.
FLAC is what Amazon should offer! That would allow users pick the music degradation parameters they prefer.
Michael, Amazon.co.uk checks your IP location so using a proxy in GB works fine.
Chris, the ubuntu package works on Lenny (correct dependency versions), if I remember correctly. By the way, do you have any facts for blaming “general suckage of linux packages” or are you just rambling? How could an operating system vendor like Debian have managed this any better?
As for “not amazons fault”: You know, it is a trivial application: they could just open the source and let the distro packagers do all the work for them…
FLAC would be a great choice for me as well, I’d pay extra for that service.
Hopefully this is a trend that continues. I would like to see Netflix follow suit.
They make it a new FLAC store and they have themselves brand new customer!