| Amazon's Linux answer to iTunes is a winner |
Mar. 07, 2008
Are you a Linux user suffering from iTunes store envy? If so, Amazon has a deal for you.
While any good Linux media player, like my own personal favorite Banshee, will let you rip music from CDs, there hasn't been a good source to buy music online for Linux players ... until now.
As part of Amazon's latest MP3 download music offerings, the online retail giant is now offering its DRM (Digital Rights Management) free tunes for purchase to Linux users. Amazon is doing this by offering a new program, Amazon MP3 Downloader for Linux users.
Amazon is offering the program in both Debian's DEB and the RPM format. To make it easier to install, Amazon is including versions for Debian, Ubuntu, Fedora and openSUSE.
I installed it without a hitch on the first three, but openSUSE gave me trouble. The problem was that openSUSE 10.3 does make it easy to install software with its revised Install Software command, if the software package is in a YaST repository. If you try to use an RPM package directly with Install Software all that happens is it starts to run, and then poof, it vanishes and that's the end of that installation attempt.
There are a couple of ways around this. The first, and one that's well known to anyone who's been installing RPMs for a while, is to use the following command in a shell:
rpm -Uvh new_program.rpm
The problem with this command is that it doesn't check to see if you have the other files installed that are needed for your new program to run. The better alternative is to use yum to do the job since it will automatically check the openSUSE program repositories for any missing files.
OpenSUSE doesn't come with yum by default, so you'll need to install it with the Install Software option. This one, however, because it is in the OpenSUSE program libraries should install without a hitch.
Once you've installed yum, you can switch to the root user, and install your program from the shell with the command:
yum localinstall new_program.rpm
These is all fine and good, but let's face it, it's got Linux/Unix geek written all over it. A better way for those who'd just as soon not face a command line every time they want to install an RPM is to set up a local repository.
You do this by installing openSUSE's createrepo program with, surprise, Install Software. Once installed, you set up a local directory for your RPM files. I always name mine SUSE_RPM, which hangs off my home directory; but whatever works for you will be fine.
Install this newly created directory you put in your first RPM file, and then run the following from a shell:
createrepo /SUSE_RPM
Next, bring up YaST and use the Software/Software Repositories command to add your newly created local directory as a repository. Congratulations, you now have a home for your RPM files that openSUSE will recognize as a proper software repository. This, in turn, means you can now just download your RPMs to this directory and install them without bothering with a command line the next time.
Once this was all out of the way, Amazon MP3 Downloader worked like a charm. You just search around the Amazon MP3 Store for your favorite songs, buy them and let the Downloader take care of bringing the music home. To test it out, I used it to buy and download the new Flogging Molly album, "Float."
The music, which comes at 256K bps and an average price of 99 cents a song, played flawlessly both with Banshee and on my iPod Touch after I synced the songs over. Since they have no copy protection, you can use them on any software or portable player that can deal with MP3s.
All-in-all, while I'd still like to see a native port of iTunes on Linux, the combination of Amazon MP3 Downloader and Banshee really gives me everything I could want from a media store and player. Try it; I can pretty much guarantee that you'll like it.
—Steven J. Vaughan Nichols
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