The final word on Amazon’s MP3 store
It’s amazing how quickly being linked on BoingBoing gets a problem solved.
After some assurances from someone in Amazon’s MP3 group that, despite what their customer support people told me, their ID3 tagging is not proprietary, I did a bunch more digging in the tracks I had downloaded. As it turns out, the file permissions were “-rwx——”. In other words, my user account had read-write-execute permissions on the files, but no other accounts could read them, including the accounts under which mpd and mt-daapd run on my server. No read permissions = can’t be scanned and added to the database. Once I added read permissions for other accounts, everything worked like a charm.
Long story short, everything seems good to go with Amazon’s MP3 store. There’s still the issue of their downloader not working in Linux, but they say a Linux version is in development, and it seems like a small inconvenience. Besides, it’s hard to fault them for not immediately having something available for .03% of their user base.
Anyway, thanks to Cory Doctorow and the helpful Amazon person who showed up in the BoingBoing comment thread for getting this straightened out.
So, “in English” (as people often say when they are trying to make fun of the smart person in order to make themselves feel batter), what is the difference between the Amazon mp3s and the mp3s that you … er … acquire in different ways? Could Amazon do something to change their tags/files so that they would work everywhere or will your house mate who doesn’t understand all of this as readily as you not be able to download files from Amazon and make them play on your local network?
There’s no difference between the two.
I suspect the permissions were different due to the manner in which I had to download the files (in a virtual machine running XP). My guess is that if I were able to download the files directly, there would be no issue.