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Amazon Music Store + Mac OS X (1 Viewer)

DaveF

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I'm not a big online-music shopper; I've spent $30 at iTunes perhaps in two years. But wanted some new Christmas music for the drive home later this week. I went to iTunes and wasn't seeing what I wanted; moreover I prefer the "plus" music, the DRM-free music at higher bit-rate. None of the iTunes holiday music that I saw was in that category.

But I've heard good things about the new Amazon store in recent MacBreak Weekly podcasts. So I decide to try it out. After some fumbling around, I get the Mac helper program and enable one-click shopping and now I'm off and downloading. I've just bought a Rat-Pack Rudolph song, the Muppets Christmas Album, and the Grinch song. (I only claim to know how to buy music, not to have good taste in doing so :))

The Amazon system has distinct pluses: Cheaper, at $0.89 per song. DRM-free for all music, whereas iTunes is still largely copy-protected. And it's a higher bitrate; although AAC is a more efficient encoder so I don't really know how 128 AAC compares to 256 MP3.

The downside: Amazon's system is web-based, and so is much clunkier to navigate than iTunes. I click Holiday Music, find the CD, and click to buy the song. Then click to confirm. Then click to return to shopping. And it takes me back to the top level of the music store, and I have start this navigation again. Why it doesn't take me back to the album I was just looking at escapes me. And there's no shopping cart, so I can't shop for songs of interest, then buy a few now, leaving the rest for later. But, clunky is still usable.

On the plus side, Amazon takes care of getting the songs into iTunes. The songs are downloaded as an AMZ file, and this is where the helper program comes into play. When you open the AMZ file, the helper app kicks in. First, it serves as a download manager, getting the MP3. Then it puts it into iTunes; the songs are right there in the Recently Added smartlist, as they should be.

I'm not a hardcore music shopper. I'd rather stick with iTunes, as it's easier and ten cents per song is neglible. But DRM-free, high quality (?) songs wins it for me. Amazon will probably be my first choice now for getting songs for my iPod.
 

Adam Lenhardt

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It's been the first choice for me for a while now, because my phone plays mp3s and the windows media audio formats and not m4a. (Although, interestingly enough, it's a pro when I drag all-mp3 playlists from iTunes right onto the phone)
I use an alternate organization system to the iTunes default on my Windows machine, so for me the Amazon system is actually less time consuming. I told it exactly how to save my downloads and since then it adds the files to iTunes without me having to do anything.
 

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