Buying An Album from Amazon's New MP3 Store

[Jason Dunn]

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 <a href="http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B000TEMSXE/ref=sr_f2_album_7/102-5175465-0614516?ie=UTF8&child=B000TEIPEA">album from Vicky Beeching</a> 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. <br /><br />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:<br /><br /><a href="http://www.digitalmediathoughts.com/images/amazon-MP3-downloader-big.jpg"><img src="http://www.digitalmediathoughts.com/images/amazon-MP3-downloader.jpg" /></a><br />[click image above for full-sized version]<br /><!><br />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:<br /><br /><i>4 - At All Times (Painting The Invisible Album Version).mp3</i><br /><br />Using <a href="http://www.mediamonkey.com">MediaMonkey</a> 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. ;-)<br /><br />There are also a few basic preferences that can be adjusted in the software:<br /><br /><img src="http://www.digitalmediathoughts.com/images/amazon-MP3-downloader-preferences.jpg" /><br /><br />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 <a href="http://www.digitalmediathoughts.com/images/amazon-MP3-albumart.png">still looks quite good</a>.<br /><br />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.<br /><br /><i>[Apologies for the ugly highly-compressed JPG images - I forgot that the otherwise awesome <a href="http://www.techsmith.com/screen-capture.asp">SnagIt</a> has a JPEG quality setting of 85% is really about 60% quality.]</i>

[Damion Chaplin]

I don't recall even seeing a dialogue box other than the Vista UAC prompt (man I hate that thing).

The first thing I turn off in Vista is the UAC. Do I really need to confirm twice that YES I REALLY WANT TO SEND THIS FILE TO THE RECYCLE BIN? We got along just fine for years in XP without it...

On Topic: The album art looks pretty awesome frankly. Better than most of the stuff that MediaMonkey scours from Amazon.

Also glad to see it works with Firefox. I hate having to close Firefox and open IE just because Netflix's Watch Now doesn't play nice with Mozilla. :evil:

BTW, you should be able to go into your account preferences in Amazon and tell it to use your personal card as the default card...

[Jason Dunn]

The first thing I turn off in Vista is the UAC. Do I really need to confirm twice that YES I REALLY WANT TO SEND THIS FILE TO THE RECYCLE BIN?

I've read a few things about programs, designed for Vista and expecting a UAC prompt, not installing properly because UAC is turned off...so I've resisted turning it off. I might change my mind now. ;-) Oh, the Recycle Bin prompt isn't UAC - it's the same as in XP, you need to right-click on the Recycle Bin and un-check the prompt for deleting files.

On Topic: The album art looks pretty awesome frankly. Better than most of the stuff that MediaMonkey scours from Amazon.

I think it's probably the same as what Amazon has for the album - most of the time that's a 600 x 600 JPG, so it's about the same. Although sometimes Amazon doesn't have album art or what it does have is 200 x 200...I suspect in those instances Amazon will source a higher resolution version of the file.

BTW, you should be able to go into your account preferences in Amazon and tell it to use your personal card as the default card...

You know, you'd think it would be so easy, right? Not exactly - I can't find ANY way to select the associated credit card with the MP3 store 1-click buying, or even my account in general. I have two credit cards on there, but neither one indicates it's the default. It's rather bizarre...

[Tim Williamson]

Hopefully "AmazonMP3Beta" will eventually just become "AmazonMP3" and fix some of these minor issues. :)

[OKCrew]

I too prefer artist - song.mp3 . Naming preference should be one of the options of the download app. It should rename the file on the fly for you.

It should also allow you to setup not only your file location preferences but folder structure. Its default structure happens to be my preference but others organize differently.

[Crocuta]

You know, you'd think it would be so easy, right? Not exactly - I can't find ANY way to select the associated credit card with the MP3 store 1-click buying, or even my account in general. I have two credit cards on there, but neither one indicates it's the default. It's rather bizarre...

Hey Jason. It's your lucky night as there is an easy way to get Amazon to automatically use the card you want. Here's how to do it.

The default card is tied to the shipping address and, currently, its your business card that's the default to your home. Go in and set up a second shipping address even if it's to the same place. I am assuming that the computer will consider two addresses different if anything is different. Try making an insignificant change like using Main St on one and Main Street on the other. That should work. Of course, keep track of which one goes with the business card and which one goes with the personal card.

Now buy something and have it shipped to your new address and use the personal card to pay for it. Now whenever you buy something (can't do one-click this way), it will first ask where you want it shipped. Pick the one that corresponds to the correct card and it will fill in all the rest.

This works well for me in pretty much the same situation except that I am not self-employed. I use my personal credit card for some purchases and my college's credit card for school purchases and it works great. If I choose to ship it to the college, it automatically uses that card and if I choose to ship it to home, it uses mine.

[Dyvim]

Ok, just bought 1 album and a fair number of singles from Amazon. Their search feature needs a lot of work IMO. It was kind of painful trying to find what I wanted. But once I found it, the rest was bliss.

I've been buying high bitrate DRM-free tracks from a variety of sources recently: ITunes Plus, Wal-Mart, 7digital (320 kbps MP3), independent artist websites, and now Amazon. Choice is great!

[ctmagnus]

I grabbed three albums off of the service several weeks ago, but it appears that they are now filtering geographic region by IP. Can anyone else confirm this?

[Jason Dunn]

...but it appears that they are now filtering geographic region by IP. Can anyone else confirm this?

Yup. @(*&amp;#(@&amp;#(*@&amp;#@. Will front-page post now.