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).

Posted by Jay
Filed in Geek, Linux, Open Source
9 Comments »

9 Responses to “Amazon MP3 Downloader on Fedora 11”


  1. Nicholas urfe
    July 4th, 2009 at 5:03 am

    Which version are you using? Amazon’s MP3 Downloader works just fine on my F11…


  2. Jay
    July 5th, 2009 at 1:48 pm

    Odd. I’ve tried it on both 386 and x86_64 and neither worked. Do they have a version newer than F9 posted somewhere that I missed?


  3. Ray
    July 6th, 2009 at 2:37 am

    The Amazon MP3 Downloader works great for me under F11


  4. Victor Bogado da Silva Lins
    July 6th, 2009 at 10:48 am

    The last time, that was actually the first, I tried to buy MP3 from amazon they said that my money was not good enough for them. So I never came back.


  5. Douglas Kilpatrick
    July 16th, 2009 at 7:41 pm

    I also can’t install the downloader under FC11. x86_64 version. Yum fails looking for boost libraries… so thanks for the pointer.


  6. Bob Brush
    August 9th, 2009 at 7:07 pm

    Fedora 11 x64 Amazon MP3
    If this helps, to install:

    yum install libcurl.i586 gtkmm24.i586 gtk-nodoka-engine.i586 libcanberra-gtk2.i586 PackageKit-gtk-module.i586 bug-buddy.i586
    wget mirrors.kernel.org/fedora/releases/9/Fedora/i386/os/Packages/boost-1.34.1-13.fc9.i386.rpm
    mv boost-1.34.1-13.fc9.i386.rpm /
    cd /
    rpm2cpio boost-1.34.1-13.fc9.i386.rpm | cpio -ivd ./usr/lib/libboost_thread-mt.so.1.34.1 ./usr/lib/libboost_iostreams.so.1.34.1 ./usr/lib/libboost_signals.so.1.34.1 ./usr/lib/libboost_date_time.so.1.34.1
    ln -s /usr/lib/libboost_thread-mt.so.1.34.1 /usr/lib/libboost_thread-mt.so.3
    ln -s /usr/lib/libboost_iostreams.so.1.34.1 /usr/lib/libboost_iostreams.so.3
    ln -s /usr/lib/libboost_signals.so.1.34.1 /usr/lib/libboost_signals.so.3
    ln -s /usr/lib/libboost_date_time.so.1.34.1 /usr/lib/libboost_date_time.so.3
    http://www.amazon.com/gp/dmusic/help/amd.html?&forceos=LINUX
    (use browser to accept and download to /software)
    rpm -Uvh amazonmp3.rpm –nodeps
    ln -s /usr/lib/libcrypto.so.0.9.8k /usr/lib/libcrypto.so.6
    ln -s /usr/lib/libssl.so.0.9.8k /usr/lib/libssl.so.6


  7. Dave Sill
    September 2nd, 2009 at 8:39 pm

    Excellent, thanks, guys. I installed clamz before I saw Bob Brush’s message, but never ran it. Bob’s recipe worked like a charm, although it had to install a disturbing number of packages.


  8. Robert Wood
    September 4th, 2009 at 1:49 am

    Thanks for this page! Grabbed clamz and built/installed without a problem. For anyone reading this who is not used to building from source. After you download the file (a gzip compressed tar file):
    - uncompress and unpack the file (tar –gunzip -xvof clamz-0.2.tar.gz)
    - get in the unpacked directory (cd clamz-0.2)
    - follow the directions in the README file. There
    are 3 basic steps:
    – run the autoconfigure script to setup the build (./configure). If step may fail if some required library isn’t installed, it will tell you why it quit
    – build the program (make)
    – install the program (make install) note, this must be run as root, since it copies data into system folders.


  9. anon
    September 17th, 2009 at 6:25 pm

    Thanks to Bob Brush for the easy-to-follow recipe.

    However, some people may need to run
    ldconfig
    as root, after doing all the symlinks … it depends on whether or not you attempted to run amazonmp3 before getting everything linked properly. But, ldconfig is safe to run even if it isn’t strictly required.

    bottom line: if amazonmp3 complains after following Bob’s instructions, try running ldconfig (as root) and then run amazonmp3 again.