I hate for this to turn into a range war, but Amazon seems to be getting pretty blatant about forming "Unholy Alliances". I am feeling pretty cranky right now. Here is the email that I sent them.
Using Audacity and Windows Media, I can no longer access the music I purchased. Yahoo Music was the same sort of shell game too, but on another issue. :(
Hello:
I do not have a copy of the confirmation email, but I recently purchased Katy Perry's, "One of the Boy's" as a down load. The download and set up took over two hours, and then the "I-tunes" software is just plain "clunky". So, I removed it from my computer, and guess what! I can't play "Katy" now.
I am not very happy about all this, so I am going to wait for you to fix it, for a while. If you don't it will be the end of my, and all my friends doing business with you. I have heard other nasty reports about "Amazon", I hope this is not a pattern.
Many Blessings
Gwen Boucher
Comments
Sorry, Gwen
But if you removed iTunes, you likely removed your file, too. What did you plan to play it with?
And if you think iTunes is clunky, what is better? It really is considered the standard computer music player that all other players try to compare themselves to. :)
I've bought music from iTunes, Amazon and several other sites as well as writing my own music and downloading files from the sites of the bands themselves. I've never had a major problem playing anything except some of the files I made myself and one or two that I uploaded from some really old CDs.
On the other hand, I'm rather annoyed with Amazon for not apologizing for their screw-up with the sales ratings. And they still haven't got it completely straightened out, though they do seem to be working on it.
The corporate culture at Amazon is rather amazing, I've been reading up on it. Each segment inside Amazon is run like a subcontractor to the whole enchilada. Considering that, it's a wonder a screw-up like last week's didn't affect half a million books instead of only a few tens of thousands.
But if you're annoyed at Amazon enough to avoid them, consider doing your online book purchases through Barnes and Noble or Powell's. Their websites are easy to find and I'm working on getting associate banners from them for BC. B&N is pretty good. Powell's I have no experience with but I hear good things. And there are others. Crystal's has a B&N banner on the cyberboard page.
For music, I often try to find the band's own website and see if the song can be purchased there, figuring they probably get a bigger cut that way.
Hug,
Erin
= Give everyone the benefit of the doubt because certainty is a fragile thing that can be shattered by one overlooked fact.
= Give everyone the benefit of the doubt because certainty is a fragile thing that can be shattered by one overlooked fact.
I thought I bought it?
I thought that since I paid like $9.00 or so, it was mine and I would play it with Windows Media or Audacity. I can do things with those programs and their Apple Program was just too clunky for me. So, did I actually buy a "license" to play it?
Before I went to Thailand, I loaded my laptop up with music from Yahoo Music, but it would not play there. Grrrr. For now, I guess I'll just return to buying the CDs or DVDs and playing them.
I had done business with Amazon for years and never had a problem. I am disappointed.
I do notice a lot of people using Ipods on the Bus and on the street, and I think that I have decided that these practices just isolate us from each other; producing social retardation.
Gwendolyn
You May Be Having Issues With DRM
A lot of purchased downloaded media has digital rights management (DRM) encoded in it. These schemes limit the use of the entertainment that you have bought to compatible players and specific PC's sometimes requiring that you be connected to the Internet to play your media. It's the entertainment industry that has forced these schemes on retailers such as Amazon and the PC and software manufacturers all to prevent pirating. The sad part is that the protection schemes all quickly get broken so that all that is accomplished is that the legitimate purchaser is penalized.
>>legitimate purchaser is penalized.
Not much. One can always use Audacity or a similar program (Wiretap is excellent for Mac OS-X) to capture the audio in real time, which is good enough for most uses. If one is a real audiophile and can easily tell the difference between lossy and lossless formats, or 192 kbit/s and 224–320 kbit/s, one insists upon original CDs or (better) vinyl anyway.
Puddin'
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Cheers,
Puddin'
A tender heart is an asset to an editor: it helps us be ruthless in a tactful way.
--- The Chicago Manual of Style
drm and music
gwen, there are many things that may have happened:
if I'm reading your comment right, you bought it from amazon, as a download? how does that impact on itunes? itunes has nothing to do with amazon (I don't understand your comment about "their apple program" - the two things shouldn't have anything to do with one another). since you complained to amazon support about itunes my guess is they're scratching their heads right now wondering how to respond to you, because they can't do anything at all about what you do with itunes.
or did you buy it using itunes music store? if so, how long ago? last year apple were still using digital right management (drm). they've recently changed that policy, but older content will still have that problem. it occurs to me that your beef is possibly with apple, not amazon.
if you purchased the file using itunes, it's possible you purchased it in 'aac' format, eg not as an mp3, but as one of the many different kinds of mp4. windows media player can play aac files, but only with additional plugins, for example: http://www.wmplugins.com/ItemDetail.aspx?ItemID=895 .
so if you can still find the file, you may, may be able to play it after installing that plugin, provided the file doesn't also have drm. if it does have drm, reinstalling itunes and re-authorising the file is probably your only hope.
anyway, hope that helps.
becky
ps: for your own sake, avoid purchasing files - audio or video - in windows media formats, at all costs. they almost always contain drm, and will give you nothing but trouble. the chance that wma will still be around as a microsoft standard in ten years is negligible, so don't count on hearing a wma file way into the future. likewise, even though mp3 as a format isn't as good as mp4, there are too many different flavors of mp4 for me to feel comfortable buying music in that format. mp3 is an open standard - chances are it will still exist in ten years.
and yes, as you discovered, yahoo/rhapsody etc are crappy value unless you're a twelve year old.
not as think as i smart i am
Social retardation...
For women especially, but anyone subject to assault, hate crimes, or accidents, wearing them is public is unwise as well, as one's ears are an important tool for discovering what's going on around one and not immediately before one's eyes. They're the audio equivalent of a blindfold, but people do persist in believing that it's perfectly safe to walk around with one's "eyes" covered.
Here, we should conjure up the image of Dracula, venom in his words, screaming, "You fools! Do you think with your crosses and your wafers you can destroy me?" just before he was destroyed.
To be fair, earbuds also serve as a social message that one doesn't want to be disturbed, which may be handy in some situations, as it gives one an excuse to ignore comments that one presumably "doesn't hear," often the safest course of action, but safest of all is to wear the earpieces but leave the music off.
Puddin'
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Cheers,
Puddin'
A tender heart is an asset to an editor: it helps us be ruthless in a tactful way.
--- The Chicago Manual of Style
Crystal's B&N Banner...
...hasn't been operative for more than a year. For a while it directed to a one-sentence page that said something to the effect that the link had been discontinued. Lately it's been connecting to a blank page.
I've never been clear on the way those things worked -- do they pay the host a flat fee for the link, or every time someone clicks on it, or a commission on sales generated through it, or what? -- but I had made it a point to go through StorySite whenever I went to B&N until it got cut off. (Still do for Amazon, though I suppose I ought to at least split time with BC's link.)
Eric
Commissions
I get 6%-7% for commission sales through the Amazon links here, depending on how many items sell in a month. B&N is just a flat 7% and Powell's, if I get one of their banners, is 7.5%.
Hugs,
Erin
= Give everyone the benefit of the doubt because certainty is a fragile thing that can be shattered by one overlooked fact.
= Give everyone the benefit of the doubt because certainty is a fragile thing that can be shattered by one overlooked fact.
Amazon Content
Amazon saves pointers to the MP3 content you downloaded, so if you look carefully at your account page, you should see an entry called MP3 Downloads, or something like it. Download them again.
The iTunes library *may* be there still, in which case your songs are too. With some fiddling, you can manage and merge multiple libraries.
Next time, before you remove a program like iTunes, ask a question here, or look to see what it does and what it's capable of first.
Using standard options plus one of the Advanced commands, you can tell iTunes to save files as MP3's using the Import settings under preferences, which allows you to use multiple tools to access and manage the same library.
Alternatively, once you've told iTunes that you want to use MP3's in the Import settings as above, you can export your songs in MP3 format and might have saved yourself a lot of trouble, since you could easily have exported the AAC format files iTunes uses by default as MP3's, although there may be some loss of quality caused by the conversion between two lossy formats. The cure for that (if you have the disc space) is to import as AIFF or other lossless format. Of course, if you buy MP3's, it doesn't much matter.
As I recall, Amazon MP3's install themselves in a special folder somewhere, so you might also perform a search for the album or song title and try to find whatever it was you downloaded.
There is also an iTunes option to back up either all your purchases or your entire library (presumably containing digital copies of discs you own) to CD-ROMs, which is a handy thing to do as well.
Puddin'
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Cheers,
Puddin'
A tender heart is an asset to an editor: it helps us be ruthless in a tactful way.
--- The Chicago Manual of Style
Good Ol Adage
I buy any music I want on cd or dvd and then rip them onto my hard drive using a program called freerip available at www.download.com. I prefer having the music unencrypted and on my hard drive to utilize it as a jukebox. I wear out cd and dvd drives to rapidly otherwise. And if you have a collection - make and have 2 extra backups (preferably usb hard drives that do not stay connected to the pc all the time, only for backing up.) If its worth having its worth backing up.
I prefer the real deal on cd or dvd to digital download.
Sephrena Lynn Miller
BigCloset TopShelf
>> cd or dvd
Always best. MP3's and AAC's are much reduced in quality, although still "listenable," especially through "earbuds" attached to an iPod or MP3 player.
Puddin'
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Cheers,
Puddin'
A tender heart is an asset to an editor: it helps us be ruthless in a tactful way.
--- The Chicago Manual of Style
Your music is still there
Gwen,
there's no reason to believe your music is gone just because you uninstalled iTunes. On a Mac, I could guarantee this. On Windows, I can only assume they did it right since I'm not a Windows user. Deleting data files just because some program is uninstalled is simply wrong.
Things you can do:
1. Search for files with extension .mp3 on your disks. If you don't have a competent MP3 player, find one. There are hundreds of MP3 players for windows while on mac there is basically only one. Apple killed off most amateur attempts by doing it right themselves.
2. Download iTunes from Apple again, and install it again. Verify that your music still exists. Use iTunes to convert to some format you know you can play on your current system such as .WAV files. Optional: Uninstall iTunes again (shouldn't hurt to simply keep it around even if you don't use it). If you want details about how to convert to some other file format, ask me or google for it but it's basically two steps: Select your *import* format in preferences. Then select all songs you want to convert and use the menu command "Convert to file". Now find these converted files and move them somewhere safe.
3. Download the songs again from Amazon.
- Moni
Search terms...
If iTunes was set to its default settings, the songs will probably have .m4a as a suffix, a variation on .mp4 sometimes used to distinguish audio-only files from multimedia content. The file formats are identical, and just the suffix is changed. This allows iTunes to manage and play videos and other multimedia content.
If one wants to use several different programs to access the content, MP3's are probably the handiest. Many automobile CD players, for example, can readily play MP3 disks, which allows one to stuff more (but lower-quality) music on a single disk.
It would be best to download the original MP3's if one wants the best quality, rather than converting the MP4's to MP3's.
If one runs into copy "protection," a side trip through analogue will solve it. Alternatively, there are a mort of DRM crackers around, many of which will convert Microsoft's execrable WMV files to a sensible and more stable format.
I quite agree that *buying* WMV content is unwise. Microsoft ought to *give* them away, if only to discourage people from moving away from Microsoft platforms... Oh, wait! that's why they did it in the first place, which is the Microsoft equivalent of the thoughtful Chinese practice of billing a condemned prisoner's parents for the cost of the bullet that spattered his brains on the wall.
Puddin'
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Cheers,
Puddin'
A tender heart is an asset to an editor: it helps us be ruthless in a tactful way.
--- The Chicago Manual of Style