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Amazon MP3 drops Linux, who wants my money now?

Don’t get too excited, its not a lot of money — about 6 albums and a dozen or so songs this year to date. The thing is, I really liked buying music from Amazon and had been doing so since 2008. They have great selection, a DRM-free product, good support, good prices, convenience, and the MP3 downloader worked on Linux. But not any more.

In August I bought two albums and the MP3 downloader worked fine. Today I tried to buy an album and nothing happened. The Amazon MP3 downloader application launched but nothing was downloaded. The install page for the downloader now says “We apologize — Linux is not supported.”. That was news to me. I contacted support and they confirmed Linux was not supported (even though Linux support was still mentioned on a FAQ page). The person was very polite and helpful and refunded my money for the product I wanted but can’t have, at least not my way. I could send the music to the Amazon cloud player and listen to it from there but that is not the product I want. It is not the product I thought I was buying but then I went back to the Amazon MP3 store landing page (I usually jump right into search or follow direct links) and it is clear that MP3s and Amazon Cloud player now go hand in hand like iTunes and iPod. This is the exact opposite of what I want and why I liked Amazon for buying MP3s in the first place. The cloud player says “Your music. Everywhere.” but I already have that so it offers me nothing new.

Its not just Linux users that are affected. The move to the cloud has an impact on Mac and Windows users as detailed by the The Leisurely Historian.

So where can I buy my MP3s now? Is it back to CDs?

3 Comments

  1. theSnydes3000
    theSnydes3000 Wednesday, September 26, 2012

    You need to write on here more. Once every September is not enough.

  2. jc
    jc Saturday, September 22, 2012

    You can istall Banshee. It supports amazon’s mp3 store natively. It’s even less messy to install than amazon’s mp3 downloader

  3. james
    james Thursday, September 13, 2012

    It is a pain in the behind but you can still download them individually from the cloud player (select single song and click on download).

Comments are closed.