Date

I've bought digital music from Amazon for almost as long as they've been in that business. Their prices are very competitive, the MP3's are dog-standard and DRM-free so they work on every device imaginable, and, until recently, they have supported Linux.

Admittedly, they haven't supported Linux well for some time. Their own downloading app (when it was available) had fallen into disrepair and didn't work on most modern Linux distributions. However, the simple, yet effective, clamz filled that void quite nicely.

Now, however, when you try to download more than one file at a time, you're greeted with this message:

On Linux systems, Cloud Player only supports downloading songs one
at a time. To download your music, deselect all checkboxes, select
the checkbox for the song you want to download, then click the
"Download" button.

Changing the User Agent string and/or deleting cookies doesn't seem to get over the wall. Other clamz users don't appear to have any solutions.

When I contacted Amazon customer support to confirm that there was truly no workaround, the reply was:

I am sorry to know that you are not able to download multiple
songs from the cloud player. To download multiple songs you will
need the Amazon MP3 downloader. However since you are using a
Linux operating system, you will need to download one song at a
time from the cloud player.

Indeed, we have always been at war with Eastasia. And you've never been able to purchase and download MP3's from Amazon on a Linux box. The hundreds of dollars I've spent doing just that certainly don't mean anything. Thankfully, since it's all DRM-free they can't take away what I already have.

Sorry, Amazon, but I'm not a clicking monkey. I'll need to go elsewhere. Can anyone else recommend another DRM-free service that doesn't require jumping through so many hoops to download purchases?


Comments

comments powered by Disqus