New Blog

I’ve decided to start a new blog with a more generic name as I am beginning to move away from Ubuntu to other distributions and want to write about my experiments without them being tagged to an Ubuntu blog. My new blog is here, Martin Cooper’s Linux Blog

Amazon MP3 Downloader for Linux

I’ve just come across a site called textbookstuff that does DRM free audiobooks in MP3 format, these are limited to out of copy write books and poems and they are new so only have a few available at the moment. The difference is the books are read by well known reader but are produced with sound effects and music which make them more like a BBC play. They provide their book through various download options but the prices vary quite widely, the one I looked at downloading cost between £4.99 and £9.99 dependant which option you chose, the cheapest being Amazon which immediately caused me a problem as I wanting to use a Linux solution however the Linux solutions provided by Amazon failed to work due to dependency issues and also no 64bit support. This was solved by a little program called pymazon found here this worked for me in both Ubuntu 11.04 and Linux Mint Debian Edition both running XFCE . To install it from a Terminal just run the following commands;

$ sudo apt-get install python-crypto
$ sudo apt-get install python-qt4
$ wget http://pymazon.googlecode.com/files/Pymazon-0.9.tar.gz
$ tar -xzf Pymazon-0.9.tar.gz
$ cd Pymazon-0.9
$ sudo python setup.py install

and run from a Terminal with;

$ pymazom

Open the [Preferences] options and change the [Save Directory] to one of your choice.

Then buy your audiobook/music on Amazon, during the process it will ask you to download their Linux version of the software unfortunately it does not support 64 bit and even the 32 bit versions have dependencies missing. So just click on the link following the text which says “If you have already installed the Amazon MP3 downloader click here” and continue the purchase. Once complete a download should start of an .amz file e.g AmazonMP3-12345678.amz which you should direct to a folder of your choice. Next open python, select the [Load Files] optin and navigate to your previously stored .amz file and open it, pymazon will then display a list of your purchased tracks and these can then be downloaded using the [Download] button and once downloaded displayed with the [Show Downloads] button.