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Speaking of music collection - for the past week I'm trying to download two albums that I bought, off of Amazon's Cloud Player. Apparently, their own MP3 Downloaded is horribly broken on Windows 7 (given that screenshots on their support page show Windows XP in 2012, I'm not that surprised). Makes me wonder if I ever want to keep anything up there, if I can't get it out.

Woz is right on the money - anything we put in the cloud make us be on the mercy of provider's business plan, reliability and plain quality of QA processes.



Store fluffy cloud-like stuff in the cloud.

I couldn't care any less if my Facebook posts or Twitter updates were wiped off the face of the earth.

I would care if my email archives, photographs, music collection, etc., were destroyed, but with varying degrees of concern. For example, I'll often buy individual music tracks from iTunes, but if I know I want a whole album, I buy a physical CD. I might only use the CD once to rip it to my computer, but I have an automatic backup that, so far, seems pretty robust, as I still have working CDs that I bought in the mid-1990's... which is more than I can say for my email archives!


Re CDs - that's precisely why I'm trying to download albums that I bought from Amazon. I feel much safer when I have access to my media locally, on my terms, with software I choose.


There are third-party implementations of the MP3 Downloader. I've used Pymazon, which worked well under Linux. There's also clamz.

- http://code.google.com/p/clamz/

- http://code.google.com/p/pymazon/


My anecdote: I bought two albums as one-click purchases from Amazon and downloaded them to my phone before they realized my credit card info was no longer valid. I was too scared not to buy them again!


The fun part is that I bought another album few months ago and two minor versions of their MP3 Downloader earlier, and it worked for me just fine.




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