[UPDATED AFTER MY INITIAL TANTRUM]
Updated on 6-29-2014 - I looked over this post which I wrote a couple of years ago and felt like it needed an update now that I can look back on things more calmly.
For quite some time now I've bought all my tunes from Amazon. One of the reasons is that my primary desktop in my home office is a Linux box and they provided a native downloader for album purchase (so you wouldn't need to download each song one at a time). I buy a lot of collections ("The Best 99 Songs to Clean your Bathtub, etc), and downloading the files one at a time is strictly a non-starter.
I've been doing this for some time now...at least 3 or 4 years.
Not long ago, they started their "Cloud Music Player" where you stored your purchases on their cloud service, where you could play them or download them.
Today I went to download an album I bought a couple of weeks ago and no longer saw "Download this Album" as one of the options. After chasing around, I was presented with the following bland statement:
"On Linux systems, Cloud Player only supports downloading songs one at a
time. To download your music, deselect all checkboxes, select the
checkbox for the song you want to download, then click the "Download"
button."
What. The. Fuck? [My dear wife considers my usage of this phrase a sign that I will remain an adolescent my entire life.]
I immediately did a quick Google and found out this change had been slipped in sometime in the middle of the month.
There are a lot of unhappy soon-to-be former Amazon customers out there. [As obnoxious as this seems, Amazon still beats the hell out of iTunes for cross-platform support.]
If some witless dickhead at Amazon thinks I am going to download all of my songs one-at-a-time he is out of his freaking mind. [Okay - you can still download collections - it's just more work.]
No, just so there's no mistake, here's what is going to happen next:
I'll download every past purchase I've ever made using a piece-of-shit Windows machine I have sitting in my office (it's about 8 years old and still running XP).I'll burn through all the Amazon points on my Amazon VISA card.When it's clean, I'll cut my Amazon VISA card in half.I'll bitch about what dickheads you are at every possible opportunity.I will NEVER buy another God-damn thing from Amazon
[Not a single one of these things happened - not one. In fact, I've signed up for Amazon Prime. And free music streaming? OMG!!]
By the way, in my professional life, I use
Amazon Web Services for a number of projects. Believe me when I say I'll
start finding reasons to close those bastards down, too. [Another empty rant - while we've lessened our use of AWS slightly, it's because we are now using other cloud services in addition to AWS.]
If I want to be treated like a second-class citizen because I'm using Linux I can find plenty of other companies willing to do that -- I don't need your bullshit. [Yes, there are *plenty* of companies that treat Linux users like 2nd class citizens; Amazon is far from the worst offender. At least with Amazon Music there *are* workarounds.]
FYI - this is the real reason people pirate music: because buying it turns into a colossal pain in the ass.
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