Amazon MP3 Downloader on Fedora 11
July 3rd, 2009
I’ll cut to the chase: it doesn’t work. But have no fear, there’s an OSS solution.
I recently got into using Amazon for buying MP3s. It’s DRM-free and has a great integration with pandora.com, which lets me hear a new song and click directly in pandora’s interface to buy it. It’s technology at its finest, if not its most dangerous (to my credit card).
Amazon is annoying in the sense that you can download single MP3s as an MP3 file, but to buy a full album you have to use their proprietary downloader. This was bearable until a recent change where all MP3s now have to be downloaded using their downloader.
The problem? The most recent build of their client is for Fedora 9 (or Ubuntu 8.10 if you go that route). So their software is, um, I’ll just say “not up to date”. I was able to hack around to get it to run under Fedora 10, but it’s flat out busted in Fedora 11.
As I said at the outset, there is hope. Clamz is a command line app to download MP3s using Amazon’s .amz formatted files. It’s exactly what you think it is. You download the .amz file from Amazon (at the point in Amazon’s workflow where you should be just downloading the MP3 itself) and run the clamz executable passing in the .amz file. Poof, it just works.
I’m disappointed it has to come to this. I know Fedora 11 is still new, but that doesn’t change the fact that there was never a Fedora 10 build (and still is no Ubuntu 9.4 build) of the Amazon downloader. Serious good karma to the Clamz project for stepping up and filling this need (at least until I find a new outlet for buying MP3s; if Amazon doesn’t want to let me buy from them then I’m not gonna go nuts trying to).
Command Line Fu
July 3rd, 2009
This link seems to be being passed around the blogs, but I first saw it at pjp news.
It’s a collection of user uploaded and ranked useful commands. The idea is similar to the two entries I wrote on shell tricks but on a much bigger and cooler level. Just quickly poking around the first page of the site has already shown a number of things that are going to come in really handy. They also support all the usual useful channels like RSS and twitter, both of which you can use with a filtered threshold for user votes to limit the incoming commands to the truly awesome. There is some serious black magic to be learned on this site.
