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.