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Today Carey writes:
Hi Matt,
I’ve been a Linux convert since April 2015 and have tried several OS’s beginning with Chalet, then Peppermint, Zorin, Q4OS, Lite, Ms-15, Manjaro and now Ubuntu Mate 16.04. I even bought a laptop, dumped WIN 10 and loaded all of the above listed Os’s and now finally just Mate 16.04. I still have WIN 7 Pro on my desktop and will build a new Cube box this Summer and I want to only have Linux but I will not be able to purchase my music from Amazon as I’ve been doing for years. With that being so, I’m probably going to have to dual-boot Mate 16.04 and WIN 7 Pro UNLESS you can direct me to some method to solely use Linux and be able to still use Amazon’s Music downloads? Can you help or provide guidance on this issue?
Thanks.
Hi Carey,
I completely get where you’re coming from. Like you, I still buy from Amazon Music even though many folks have suggested using Google Play Music instead. Don’t get me wrong, I use the Streaming service for music from Google. But since I find myself being gifted with Amazon gift cards with each holiday, my musical purchases remain with Amazon.
So here’s the good news – it’s still perfectly doable to purchase music from Amazon. What isn’t working any longer is the once-famed Amazon Music downloader application. This application was discontinued.
As you can see from the images below, I walk you through the purchase of a song using Firefox without Flash installed. I then decided to download said song from the Amazon Music Cloud Player rather than from my Orders page. Either approach works just fine.
Taking things a step further, I also included an image of me downloading a group of songs at once. If you plan on using Linux to manage your music, odds are fair you’ll want to use a locally installed media player like Banshee.
Now, here’s the downside of doing bulk music downloads from Amazon Music Cloud Player – it will download more than one song into a zipped directory. But as you can see from the image below, I could simply choose to extract said music into my music directory. From there, the extracted song would be instantly available to listen to from your favorite Linux music player.
Let’s summarize – anyone telling you that buying music and downloading it isn’t possible with desktop Linux is seriously mistaken. I proved this to be possible in the included images. The only real change is that you won’t have the Amazon Music Downloader application available. I say good. It was a mess anyway.
Okay, last consideration. For the sake of argument, let’s say you’re someone who wants an Amazon-branded music player. I honestly would rather download the music myself to play it in something better, but that’s okay – here’s a way to have the Amazon Music Cloud Player feel like a locally installed application.
A desktop application launcher for Amazon Music Cloud Player
1) Install Google Chrome (I suggest thing because it keeps Flash in a tight little box, as you’ll need it for Amazon Music Cloud Player)
2) Login to Amazon Music, browse to the page you’d like to start off at…such as https://music.amazon.com/songs.
3) Go to Chrome settings, More Tools, Add to desktop, Leave Open as Window checked, click the Add button.
4) Now a new icon launcher for Amazon Music Cloud Player appears on your desktop. Simply double click it.
5) You will see the address bar one time – login and it will disappear once you login. Now you have an Amazon Music Cloud Player in what feels like self-contained application.
To be ultimately clear, this is NOT something I recommend for most folks. Personally, I recommend using a decent music manager like amaroK, Clementine, or Banshee. Heck, Banshee has the Amazon store available from within the software! So that’d be my first recommendation if you want to buy music from within a music app. Hopefully, this gives you a variety of options.
Google Music is arguably better than Amazon Music
As someone will eventually mention it – Google Play Music. Not only does it allow you to utilize a true Music downloader/uploader like Amazon used to offer, you can also run an unofficial Google Music application that in my humble opinion, is outstanding. I use the unofficial Google Music app to run my streaming subscription – it also supports any uploaded music as well.
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Matt has written about various software titles, such as Moodle, Joomla, WordPress, openCRX, Alfresco, Liferay and more. He also has additional Linux experience working with Debian based distributions, openSUSE, CentOS, and Arch Linux.
So long as Amazon **requires** the activation and use of 1-Click for digital and App purchases, I will absolutely **not** be buying anything from them. I don’t care how easy or not it is to download from them, 1-Click is nothing more than a SCAM to trick people into accidental purchases they don’t want, and was the subject of an unwarranted and invalid patent suit.
Not sure if they still do, don’t recall needing to click that.
I think 1-Clock ordering is an optional thing that you can enable or disable on your account. They made it to be convenient so customers wouldn’t have to go through the whole process of the check out page. I’m pretty sure you can return an item you accidentally buy. Amazon is really great about returns!
Combining both sections of your article and you can download all your Amazon Music purchases, then move them into your Google Play Music folder and essentially migrate to using Play Music by enabling auto-upload on your Music folder, which is awesome.* And if you’re lucky enough to have an Android device, you have all your music on the go in a great app as well. Then anytime you make a music purchase on Amazon, repeat the Download, Move process and migrate it to Google Play Music. Also, the Google Play Music native Linux application is pretty solid as well. It… Read more »
How do you feel about using the Amazon Music Player via WINE? Does that even work?