the Life of Zim

Recently I made the switch from iTunes to SongBird. The main reason for the change is that I also recently made the switch from my iPhone to the Nexus One. To make a long story longer, I’ve felt that Apple has been on a slow and steady decline since releasing the iPhone and probably more attributed to teaming up with the likes of AT&T and other carriers internationally. In short Apple has been tightening it’s grip on user experience and customizing, which I hate. Don’t get me wrong I love(d) my iPhone, but it was just time to switch. And although I haven’t blogged about it much yet (which I should) I absolutely love my Nexus One. Love it. However, iTunes and the Nexus One don’t play together. Not that they don’t play well, they’re just completely incompatible; another sign of how Apple’s grip is loosing customers. While the Nexus One is completely open, simply appearing as an external drive that can be written to, iTunes will only write out to iPods and iPhones. Maybe I’d still be using them if they could write songs to any device. Oh well.

So. Now that I’m off of iTunes, I’m in need of a new source of digital music. After seeing an old friend’s facebook post about their new album being released on Amazon, I figured I’d get myself a copy and have since purchased a number of songs and albums off of Amazon’s MP3 store. That is until today. Last night I started up Songbird on the task of organizing my music. With the quantity of music to be copied to a new location the task took quite a bit of time. Meanwhile I decided to download a few songs from Amazon. The way the Amazon MP3 works, is that you download an Amazon MP3 file that must be opened through their Amazon MP3 Downloader. Well yesterday I had Songbird going through all my MP3s and soas not to create havoc in that process I decided to refrain from downloading my Amazon MP3s until the morning. I had downloaded the files to be opened by the Amazon MP3 Downloader, but not the actual MP3 files. Upon open said files this morning I see this coming out of Amazon’s app:

Download no longer available.

What the hell is that!? I go into my Amazon account. I can see the songs that I’ve purchased. When selecting my three songs from this morning, Amazon says “already downloaded”. Hmm. Annoying? Yes. Bullshit? Yes. Explainable? I wish.

Basically what this comes down to is that I’m not using Amazon to download MP3s anymore. Or if I do, I will be skeptical. Digital downloads are a tricky thing. I’m a web developer. I understand this. That said, if a company like Amazon wants to start selling MP3s, it needs to have it’s shit figured out. After a quick google, I found that I am hardly the only person this has happened to. It’s one thing to download a file, accidentally delete it and then not be able to re-download. But to say you can’t download this file because you’ve already downloaded it, when you simply haven’t? That’s bullshit. That’s someone else’s f*** up that I just paid $3 for. If it was more money I’d probably contact Amazon and have a string of posts after this talking about how bullshit (or amazing) Amazon’s customer service is. But it’s $3 so I don’t care that much. Instead I’m just not going to use them any more. Little ‘ol me? Not a big deal. I might spend a few hundred dollars a year on MP3 downloads. However, for a company as big as Amazon, I’m sure there are hell of a lot more people just like me that are having a similar experience. Say 1,000 people? Reasonable? Sure. Multiply by $300/year? That’s $300K a year because some programmer(s) can’t get their shit together? Lame. Especially when Amazon is going up against a giant like Apple’s iTunes Store? No wonder they have such a huge market share.

Me? I’m still trying to stay off of iTunes. Apple’s getting too big for it’s own good. I still love them, but they’re doing things that make me nervous for them. Songbird has the 7digital store, which is okay. Seems like they’ve got a fair amount of stuff on there. Haven’t used it a ton, but it seems to be pretty well integrated with Songbird, which I like.