Amazon has a DRM-free, MP3 standard based downloadable music store now…not new news to anybody following this sort of thing.
This should be exciting to a Linux user like myself, who’s still left with almost no choices in legal online music downloads, even as I watch the DRM empire crumble around me.
Except that Amazon MP3 Downloads still don’t work with Linux.
Now, there’s nothing magical or prohibitive about their MP3 files…it’s just that the only interface to getting them is Amazon’s proprietary download tool.
As frustrating as this is, I have to admit…it’s a pretty reasonable limitation. When I used to buy five or six albums at a time from a well known, perfectly legitimate, and not at all questionable Russian business enterprise, their downloading solution was to give me a page with all eighty or so song links on it for me to rightclick->save-as. A simple wget script fixed this for me, of course, and the brave early Songbird users no doubt found that everything worked for them automatically, but the point here is pretty clear; the standard consumer operating system miserably fails at handling the use-case of MP3 album purchases…there’s massively too much manual file management involved. Amazon’s clever tool wrangles files and pops playlists into media players for you, moving the service neatly into the “it just works now” category.
So, Amazon has committed to making a Linux version of their downloader tool, on no specified timeframe or feature set. Cool. But then one has to think…why do they need to?
Amarok is not only a robust and capable Linux parallel to iTunes on the Mac or Windows Media Player on Windows, but already has built into it a modular, extensible music store feature that allows users to browse and buy music from inside the application. It’s unfortunately also useless, because right now it only works with the indie-friendly and extremely limited Magnatune music store, which is full of Warm Fuzzy Feelings™, but doesn’t actually carry music that people want to buy.
So, Amazon inside Amarok. Gives Amazon a stable and polished entry into a desktop space which is, honestly, quite difficult for enterprises to penetrate, it offers free promotion to any users who play with Amarok, and it’s the path of least resistance for users to buy stuff. Win-win. Why hasn’t this happened already?
I suppose the Gnome and Rhythmbox users will need a solution (I must confess it’s a good player), but I still look forward to seeing Amarok integration at least as a peripheral option.
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