Get your holler on!

Because Amazon.com sells music that is DRM-free, and because they offer such a large variety of music, it’s no wonder their music service appeals to so many.  Another thing that might draw people in is that their MP3 Downloader software is not only available for Windows users, but also for Mac and Linux users.  Often times companies who offer various types of electronic services do not offer a Linux version, which can be very frustrating.  The fact that Amazon.com has not forgotten about its Linux users makes me (and most likely others…) quite pleased.

However, at the time of this writing, their current Linux installers are for Ubuntu 9.04, Debian 5, Fedora 11, and OpenSuse 11.1.  For most, if not all of these Linux distributions, their current versions are beyond the version numbers listed above, and (although I can only speak for Ubuntu and Debian at this time) when you go to install the Amazon.com MP3 Downloader software that is associated with your Linux distro, you are likely to run into dependency issues, assuming that your Linux distribution is newer than the version numbers listed above.

In the case of both Ubuntu 10.04 and the current Debian “Squeeze”, when installing the Amazon software, instead of using current libraries for libboost v.1.40.0, dependency issues were flagged as errors, and libboost v.1.34.1 library files needed to be installed.  It turns out that there are seven of them.

Download the dependencies

Although the 7 dependencies that I have herded together came from the packages.ubuntu.com/karmic/ website, I tested them successfully on both Ubuntu 10.04 and Debian Squeeze.  Download the dependencies here. Please note that all of these dependencies are for x86 systems.  Incidentally, Amazon.com’s MP3 Downloader software is only packaged for 32 bit systems at this time.

Installation Procedure

Open a terminal session, navigate to the tarball  that you downloaded from the link above, and unpack the file:

$ tar -xvzf AmazonMP3-InstallerForUbuntuNewerThan-9.04.tar.gz

Using your file manager, open up the new directory called AmazonMP3-InstallerForUbuntuNewerThan-9.04.  Inside, you will find a README.txt file that contains a bit of helpful information.  I would imagine that there is a way that all of these .deb files could be packaged into one installable .deb file (so that you would not have to walk through seven different installations), but I’m not quite sure how that works yet (although I’d love to learn).  If anyone has any advice on this, please feel free to contact me or post in the comments for everyone’s benefit.

The .deb files are listed in order, starting with #01 and ending with #07.  Right click on the first one in the list, select “Open with GDebi Package Installer” and walk through the installation process.  Repeat this process until you’ve installed all seven of the dependencies.

Download / Install Amazon MP3 Downloader

To install the Amazon.com MP3 Downloader software, go to the link below and download either the Ubuntu or Debian versions, depending on which system you are running.
http://www.amazon.com/gp/dmusic/help/amd.html/ref=sv_dmusic_5
Save the file to your hard drive (perhaps in the same location where all of the .deb files are that you have just installed…).  Then navigate to this file and install it using the GDebi installation procedure described in the paragraph above.

How to Use the MP3 Downloader Software

To use the MP3 Downloader software, navigate to Amazon.com’s website, login to your Amazon account, locate digital music that you wish to download, then select either the “Buy MP3″ button to download one song, or the “Buy MP3 album with 1-Click” button to download the album.

Assuming that your credit card information is already stored in your personal Amazon account, you’ll be able to walk through this procedure fairly easily.  Once you have clicked one of the Buy buttons, you will be given a chance to either cancel or proceed with the purchase.

Click Cancel to cancel the purchase, or to continue, click the Continue button.  Assuming that you continue with the purchase, you will will be prompted to either download or open the .amz file.  Select Open With Amazon MP3 Downloader.

Your Amazon MP3 Downloader should then open up and display the download progress.

Once the download has completed, you will be notified.  Notice in the above screenshot image that there is a button to “View Download Directory”.  In Ubuntu 10.04, his will take you to your ~/Music/Amazon MP3 directory.  In the latest CrunchBang Statler10 Alpha2 version (Debian Squeeze with Openbox), your files will be stored under ~/Amazon MP3.

Here’s the screenshot from CrunchBang Statler10 Alpha2:

In Conclusion

As an individual who likes to support local businesses as much as possible, my intent in this article is not to endorse a monster media conglomerate such as Amazon.com, but when it comes to downloading DRM-free music from a Linux-friendly source that offers a wide selection of music that I like, I’ve been highly pleased with Amazon’s MP3 Downloader service.

Hopefully, Amazon.com will soon come out with newer versions of the MP3 Downloader software for Linux (so that we don’t have to jump through all of the hoops listed above…), and hopefully they will also continue to link to old versions of the software for those who choose to run older Linux distributions.

In my previous post, I talked about how you can use Nautilus and the nautilus-image-converter as tools for resizing and rotating your images.  Although PCManFM is my preferred file manager, and I often use Thunar if I am bulk renaming files, I keep coming back to Nautilus for file management, network file browsing, image resizing/rotation, and for the ability to use custom scripts that help make life a little bit easier.  It is the latter that I wish to mention here.

Add Music Easily to the MoC Player Using Nautilus

The Nautilus script that I use most frequently is specific to the MoC (Music on Console) music player.  Credit for this one goes to Tyler “-z-” Mulligan. I’ve written in the past about the MoC Player, and of all of the music players that I’ve tried in the past, this one is by far my favorite.  So how does the script work?  Download Tyler’s script and save it in your ~/.gnome2/nautilus-scripts folder.  Change the permissions so that the file is executable.

$ chmod +x mocp.sh

Open up an instance of MoCp (the MoC player), open up Nautilus, and navigate to your music.  You can select individual files or large selections of files, then right click on the file(s), hover over the Scripts item, then select mocp.sh from the list.  This will add the file(s) to your MoCp playlist.  It’s an efficient way of loading music into your player, and is especially nice when you are looking to pick and choose only a song or two from various albums.

Mount and Unmount ISO Images Using Nautilus

Other scripts that I use on occasion are for mounting and unmounting an ISO file. Although there are other methods listed here and here, and likely even more here, I have had good luck with the mount.sh and unmount.sh files that were posted by Lori Kaufman on the Help Desk Geek website.

Save the mount.sh and unmount.sh files to your ~/.gnome2/nautilus-scripts folder, and change the permissions so that the files are executable.

$ chmod +x *.sh

Using Nautilus, navigate to your ISO file, right-click on it, then select “Scripts” from the menu; then select mount.sh to mount the file, or unmount.sh to unmount an already mounted file.

Check out Lori’s article for more screenshots and instructions.

Note to Self: Here are some other Nautilus scripts that I have not yet explored, but will put on the backburner for later.

Although I’ve been meaning to share this information with you for some time, it was a comment in this post that recently prompted me to get busy writing.  Someone asked the question, why use Nautilus in OpenBox?  Gnome is the desktop manager that I use at work, and Nautilus is the file manager that I use most often on that machine; however, all of my personal machines run either OpenBox or Pekwm, and I wanted to still be able to use the scripts and features that I have grown to love that are available for Nautilus.

How to bulk resize images with Nautilus:

This is a feature that I use regularly in Nautilus.  Sure, there are likley other ways to bulk resize images, possibly with Imagemagic or some other cli tool, but the method that I am about to describe is fast and easy, and it works well for me.  First, make sure that you have installed Nautilus.

$ sudo apt-get install nautilus

Then install the nautilus-image-converter package.  If you have opened Nautilus, make sure that you close the application before installing the image converter package.

$ sudo apt-get install nautilus-image-converter

If you are a Gnome user, you may have to restart Gnome in order for the settings to take effect; if unsure, just log out and log back in. If not a Debian user and you wish to use the nautilus-image-converter application, you can find packages for other Linux distributions here:
http://www.bitron.ch/software/nautilus-image-converter.php

Open Nautilus and navigate to an image or selection of images.  Right-click on the image(s) and you will see that there are two new options listed near the bottom of your menu.  Resize Images / Rotate Images

Click on the Resize Images option.  If you have selected multiple images, this tool will bulk resize all of the images for you. Various resizing options are available to you:

• Resize using a list of predetermined sizes
• Scale images based on percentage of reduction
• Specify a custom sizing scheme
• Make a copy of the original file, resize it, and append “.resized” or some other custom wording at the end of your file names
• Resize in place, meaning that you will be resizing your original file

If you are resizing a mass of high resolution images, go get yourself a cup of coffee and some breakfast because it’ll take a while, but far less time than if you had to resize each image individually with your favorite image editing tool.

Rotating Images With Nautilus

Of course, there are many tools that will allow you to rotate an image, and I will often times use alternate tools for image rotation (such as GPicview), but the nautilus-image-converter is a great choice if you wish to bulk rotate images, or if you have a need to maintain the integrity of your original image file and create a rotate copy.  As described above, using Nautilus, select the image or images that you wish to rotate.  Right-click on the image(s), select the Rotate Images option, and specify your desired options.  The choices are:

• Select a preset angle (90ᵒ clockwise/counter-clockwise, or 180ᵒ)
• Custom Angle (degrees clockwise)
• Create a copy of the original file, rotate the copy, then append something to the file name, such as “.resized”
• Rotate in place, which will rotate the original file

Problems/Issues for OpenBox Users

Nautilus has a tendency to take over your desktop if you are an OpenBox user.  If you are unsure of what I am saying, just launch Nautilus and you will see what I am talking about.  Your desktop wallpaper image will likely change or go away, and you will loose the ability to right-click on your desktop and obtain the beautiful menu that you are so accustomed to seeing.  Urukrama has written a very detailed guide to using OpenBox (much of which also applies to Pekwm) and he explains how to prevent Nautilus from taking over your desktop settings.

For a single-use (non-permanent) way to launch Nautilus in a way that it won’t take over your desktop settings, use:

$ nautilus --browser --no-desktop

Alternately, to make this setting more permanent (this is what I do…), type the following command into your terminal:

$ gconftool-2 --set /apps/nautilus/preferences/show_desktop --type bool False

Summary

As I stated before, there is usually more than one way to accomplish a particular task, and it’s likely that there are some lengthy and complex commands that will allow you to bulk resize images via cli, and perhaps there are some other GUI tools available.  The “best” method to accomplish a task is really a matter of individual opinion; the method that I have described is what I have found works the best for me.  If you have a bulk-image-resize procedure that works well for you, I’d love to learn about it, so please share it with us in the comments.