More on the Amazon MP3 Store

Although I have previously voiced my gripes with Amazon’s MP3 Downloads store, I decided to give them another chance last week after reading the news that Sony/BMG was dropping DRM from their mp3 offerings.

Amazon’s selection has improved dramatically since the last time I looked at the service. Nearly every sample search I tried was a success, and I quickly found two albums to purchase. They still require customers to install their ridiculous MP3 Downloader software in order to buy full albums, so I started up XP in VirtualBox, installed the thing, and downloaded the albums.

The downloads were quick. The downloader defaults to automatically starting Windows Media Player, but I was able to find the configuration switch to disable this functionality. The tracks themselves are encoded at 256kbps, and aside from an “Amazon MP3″ notes in the comment field for each song, appeared to be entirely normal mp3′s. They played fine when I moved them from one machine to another, as well as from my iPod.

Aside from the XP issue, I thought, not a bad experience, and I’ll admit to no small amount of excitement at the prospect of being able to get legitimate, DRM-free mp3′s all in one place.

Not so fast.

On my media server, I use two services for serving out my music: mt-daapd, which shares music out on my local network to clients like iTunes; and mpd, which allows over-the-network control of music playing directly from the server. Each of these services relies on its own database, built from scans of the ID3 tags on all the mp3 files. Unfortunately, Amazon’s ID3 tags are not picked up by the scans, effectively rendering these tracks unplayable by either mpd or mt-daapd.

Having tried retagging all of the files with an ID3 tag editor, I emailed Amazon’s customer support about the problem, and got the following response:

Indeed this is a little more of an abstract question. Unfortunately we are unable to release any information on how we run our ID3 tagging as it’s proprietary. The only thing I can think to do is manually re-tag each Album/Track.

I hope you find this information helpful. Thanks for buying MP3 Music Downloads on Amazon.com.

Proprietary ID3 tagging? Are you kidding me?

I salute Amazon for having what appears to be an actual human get back to me (and rather promptly, I might add), and I realize that the issue I have is not one that most consumers will run into. However, having gotten this far with their service, and being on the verge of giving them virtually all of my music-purchasing business, I am disappointed that Amazon still insists on inserting utterly unnecessary proprietary junk into their products, thereby rendering them next to useless for me.