Amazon MP3’s
April 18, 2008
Okay… big question to you iTunes weenies… why iTunes? In my quest for a pure Open Source system, I got stuck on iTunes since that’s been my sole source to buy digital music. But I’ve never liked the iTunes interface and hated that I couldn’t take my music to any computer and play it (especially since I have a computer in just about every room of my home).
Enter Amazon.
I just used the Amazon MP3 service. Same price as iTunes… and I got high quality MP3 files that I was able to put on my internal file server and use on all my computers… including my soon-to-be-installed Linux desktop. It appears that Amazon, unlike Apple, actually wrote a Linux client for their service.
Niiiiiiiice…
I’m currently enjoying The Choir’s, O How The Might Have Fallen. As MP3’s. Purchased from Amazon.
April 18th, 2008 at 10:50 pm
Don’t confuse the organization, syncing and sorting capabilities of iTunes with the purchase of DRM-encumbered music from the iTunes Store. I’m a big iTunes fan for creating smart playlists and syncing to my iPod, but purchasing music from the iTunes store doesn’t factor in.
For me, iTunes+iPod is the “it just works” solution. I’ve written some scripts to export the playlists from the iTunes library so that I can make use of them using my MediaPortal HTPC and my XBMC.
April 18th, 2008 at 11:14 pm
True, but there are other alternatives for keeping files and play lists straight. And, again, iTunes doesn’t work in Linux.
I haven’t tried it, yet, but I’m looking at using Banshee for my media player in Linux. It looks a lot like iTunes.
I will say, it’s a nice environment and media player. I just don’t get their DRM model. With Amazon being the next big player in the digital music space, iTunes is going to have to drop their DRM. I mean, even if I continue to use the iTunes player, I can still buy stuff from Amazon and just pull it into iTunes. Heck, Amazon’s download applet even offers to do it for me. That seems like an awful big whole that Apple’s left open that will really bight them in the butt.
April 19th, 2008 at 8:08 am
I’m not so much in love if iTunes as I am with the iPod and the ability to sync to it. I wonder if there are open source alternatives that sync to the iPod. Because of the “just works” aspect I’d never researched it.
iTunes does have some DRM-free music, but honestly, I don’t think it’s Apple forcing the DRM on customers. I was under the impression they’re just adhering to the contracts they’re able to negotiate with the labels. Are there any songs available on Amazon DRM-free that aren’t available DRM-free on iTunes?
And by the way, I’m defending/supporting iTunes mostly because you called me a weenie and asked me to.
April 19th, 2008 at 2:36 pm
At the risk of sounding like Cramer on “Mad Money” (”That’s not what I meant about Bear Sterns!”), the weenies I was referring to were the folks that continue to buy iTunes music when there are DRM-free solutions out there. iPod sync is definitely a plus, though I’m not quite sold on the iPod, yet. Too expensive. But I must admit, it’s better than the Zune by a long shot.