Please, Amazon!

I saw this FriendFeed post from Dave earlier, and his post about The Band. I always liked The Band; even though the $1.99 Amazon special on the greatest hits album that Dave references appears to have expired, I thought this may be a good day to stock up on some good tunage.

I’ve downloaded MP3s from Amazon in the past, one MP3 at a time. Even for MP3 albums. A bit of a PITA. So today I tried to install the Amazon MP3 Downloader for Fedora 9. The download, followed by yum install amazonmp3.rpm, was greeted with:

Error: Missing Dependency: libboost_thread-mt.so.3 is needed by package 1:amazonmp3-1.0.3-1.i386 (amazonmp3.rpm)
Error: Missing Dependency: libboost_signals.so.3 is needed by package 1:amazonmp3-1.0.3-1.i386 (amazonmp3.rpm)
Error: Missing Dependency: libssl.so.6 is needed by package 1:amazonmp3-1.0.3-1.i386 (amazonmp3.rpm)
Error: Missing Dependency: libcrypto.so.6 is needed by package 1:amazonmp3-1.0.3-1.i386 (amazonmp3.rpm)
Error: Missing Dependency: libboost_date_time.so.3 is needed by package 1:amazonmp3-1.0.3-1.i386 (amazonmp3.rpm)
Error: Missing Dependency: libboost_iostreams.so.3 is needed by package 1:amazonmp3-1.0.3-1.i386 (amazonmp3.rpm)

I have newer versions of all these libraries; I suppose I could have created symlinks from the new versions to the required versions, crossed my fingers and hoped it would work.

Instead, I contacted Amazon, and asked if source code to the downloader is available. I’d compile the thing myself. I’d even package it up, and give it back to them. While I await their reply via mail-o-gram, it occurred to me that Amazon should just open source the downloader; I’m sure that some pacakge maintainer could take the downloader, and see that it was made available for Debian/Ubuntu/Fedora distributions. That would be the ticket, and show the world that Amazon is committed to the widest possible audience for their service. Just speaking for myself, I’d easily have spent $30 today on MP3s, if I didn’t have to snag them one at a time.

So, please, Amazon. Let us Linux folk play, too. Thanks!

-k-

amazon, fedora