Tuesday, September 25, 2007
Buying An Album from Amazon's New MP3 Store
Posted by Jason Dunn in "THOUGHT" @ 12:15 PM
Although you can buy individual MP3 tracks from Amazon.com with a simple click and download, I was curious what the experience of buying an album was like. I selected an album from Vicky Beeching that I had on my Amazon.ca wishlist. It costs $15.99 CAD (about $16 USD) to buy from Amazon.ca, so buying the album in digital form for $9.99 USD was a great deal.
I use Firefox as my browser, so I was curious to see how the process would work. The Amazon music tool is a small 575 KB file that installs quickly - I don't recall even seeing a dialogue box other than the Vista UAC prompt (man I hate that thing). After it installed, I clicked on the "1 Click Album Purchase" logo and was immediately prompted by Firefox to OPEN or SAVE a .AMZ file - the Amazon page explains that this is the download trigger file and I should select open. I suspect that with IE7 it would just trigger automatically. At any rate, I clicked open, and immediately the Amazon MP3 Downloader popped up:
[click image above for full-sized version]
It kicked off the download immediately, and if there's one thing Amazon doesn't lack, it's fast servers: I had the album downloaded in about 90 seconds or so. The software created an "Amazon MP3" folder in the Music folder in my Vista profile, and put the album in a sub-folder named after the album. Inside that folder, the tracks are named a bit curiously:
4 - At All Times (Painting The Invisible Album Version).mp3
Using MediaMonkey it was easy enough to change the track names. The other album I downloaded, a Blues Traveller one, just had the song name as the title, which makes things even easier. Although the metadata was perfect, I still like the file names to be in the form of (Artist) - Song.mp3 - I'm Type A like that. ;-)
There are also a few basic preferences that can be adjusted in the software:
The album art is already embedded in the file, and looks to be a 600 x 600 JPEG file. The album art is a bit more compressed than I'd have done personally, but it still looks quite good.
All in all, this is a great offering and if they can expand their music repertoire it could easily become more popular than iTunes among those that understand why it's important to not get locked into DRM tracks. If there's one thing I'd like to see it would be some way to have a more granulated check-out process. I'm certainly in the minority on this one, but I have two credit cards (one for business, one for personal) and I want to buy music with my personal card - yet my Amazon.com account is linked with my business card by default and even though I have 1-click buying turned off, it still slaps purchases onto my credit card with one click.
[Apologies for the ugly highly-compressed JPG images - I forgot that the otherwise awesome SnagIt has a JPEG quality setting of 85% is really about 60% quality.]
I use Firefox as my browser, so I was curious to see how the process would work. The Amazon music tool is a small 575 KB file that installs quickly - I don't recall even seeing a dialogue box other than the Vista UAC prompt (man I hate that thing). After it installed, I clicked on the "1 Click Album Purchase" logo and was immediately prompted by Firefox to OPEN or SAVE a .AMZ file - the Amazon page explains that this is the download trigger file and I should select open. I suspect that with IE7 it would just trigger automatically. At any rate, I clicked open, and immediately the Amazon MP3 Downloader popped up:
[click image above for full-sized version]
It kicked off the download immediately, and if there's one thing Amazon doesn't lack, it's fast servers: I had the album downloaded in about 90 seconds or so. The software created an "Amazon MP3" folder in the Music folder in my Vista profile, and put the album in a sub-folder named after the album. Inside that folder, the tracks are named a bit curiously:
4 - At All Times (Painting The Invisible Album Version).mp3
Using MediaMonkey it was easy enough to change the track names. The other album I downloaded, a Blues Traveller one, just had the song name as the title, which makes things even easier. Although the metadata was perfect, I still like the file names to be in the form of (Artist) - Song.mp3 - I'm Type A like that. ;-)
There are also a few basic preferences that can be adjusted in the software:
The album art is already embedded in the file, and looks to be a 600 x 600 JPEG file. The album art is a bit more compressed than I'd have done personally, but it still looks quite good.
All in all, this is a great offering and if they can expand their music repertoire it could easily become more popular than iTunes among those that understand why it's important to not get locked into DRM tracks. If there's one thing I'd like to see it would be some way to have a more granulated check-out process. I'm certainly in the minority on this one, but I have two credit cards (one for business, one for personal) and I want to buy music with my personal card - yet my Amazon.com account is linked with my business card by default and even though I have 1-click buying turned off, it still slaps purchases onto my credit card with one click.
[Apologies for the ugly highly-compressed JPG images - I forgot that the otherwise awesome SnagIt has a JPEG quality setting of 85% is really about 60% quality.]
