Last night, I had a good time talking to my friend Lauren, who's doing an internship in publishing, book publishing that is, and Sarah and I got to talk about our experiences with ebooks.  So, today, when I found out that Kettcar had released a new album, I decided to try out the best that modern music purchasing had to offer and I looked the album up on Amazon.



There was even an exciting 1-click ordering button on the page, which I decided to try.  I was brought to another page that seemed to say I had bought the album, and gave me a link to amazon's web-based music player and then.... nothing.


Still nothing, 20 minutes later, in fact.


I could have torrented this album ten times over in that time. And I would be listening to it now, and not at whatever point in the future Amazon decides to give it to me.


Now the actually useful part


For those of you who want a nice clean process and are on Linux, let me direct you to clamz.  Clamz lets you use .amz file that amazon will let you download to download music directly to your computer.  Those using fedora can get at it with


sudo yum install clamz

and I'm led to believe that Debian users can chant their own incantations for it as well.  It's a commandline tool, but it only does one thing that's important, so the spell is just


clamz [amazon-file].amz

which will download all of the music that file tells it about into whatever folder you're in.  Then, you're all set.