Tuesday, August 21, 2007

Music-Geek
Finally, I can buy music online!
OK, you might be thinking that purchasing music online has been around for years, but when you consider that I am using an iPod and Linux, that's not so true. Up until now, the only way to buy music was through iTunes or a similar "store" that only sold DRM'd song files. Then even when iTunes started selling some of their music without DRM, I was still left out because there is no iTunes application for Linux. (Of course it has been dead simple to get music at no-cost online, but I really do consider that stealing. How can it be easy to steal, but hard to pay for a product?!?) But now Wal-Mart has come to my rescue with their musicdownloads.walmart.com store. I can download tracks right from my web browser and now they play on my iPod, my computer, and my CD MP3 player!
It is amazing to me that it has taken this long for a retailer to finally start collecting my money!
I'll be enjoying the latest Seventh Day Slumber album now. . .

Oh, I almost forgot; the Wal-Mart store says it requires Windows, and it turns out that it will refuse to work with Firefox, but thanks to some advice from a guy on /. I installed the Epiphany browser, and that worked fine.

1 comment:

Josh said...

Update:
Now I prefer the Amazon Mp3 store, and they even offer a native downloader application for Linux!

To use it with x64 Ubuntu though, there's an extra step required. Here's what I did:
Download the amazonmp3.deb from Amazon's web site.
Then force it to install with this command:
sudo dpkg --install --force-architecture amazonmp3.deb
Then install "getlibs" from here:http://frozenfox.freehostia.com/cappy/
Then update the amazonMP3 dependencies with this command:
sudo getlibs /usr/bin/amazonmp3