Clamz and Pymazon - Download Amazon MP3's with FOSS

Recently while trying to download a digital album from Amazon's Music store, I discovered that Amazon's mp3 software no longer functioned in Arch Linux. The reason behind this malfunction is a piece of software named openssl that was recently updated after 5 years. This update of openssl has rendered AmazonMP3 downloader useless. Just to make sure that this was not a problem specific to Arch Linux, I switched over to my Ubuntu distribution and the problem was present there also. I quickly thought of three ways I could solve this problem.

1. Downgrade openssl back to 0.9.8 from 1.0.0 in Arch Linux.
I quickly found out that this would not be possible because I had cleared my package cache to save disk space and I did not want to search the internet for mirrors with the old openssl package.

2. Switch over to Ubuntu and use getlibs to download all the necessary libraries for AmazonMP3.
The instructions can be found here and here. While these procedures did work to get AmazonMP3 functioning again, it downloaded music very slowly.

3. Use Clamz as a alternative to AmazonMP3.
I remembered there was a command line program named Clamz that could download music from the Amazon music store. In order to use clamz you simply need to obtain the amz file for the album you wish to purchase. From there open a terminal emulator and type clamz and the full name of the amz file.



Example: clamz AmazonMP3-1264313761.amz

yaourt -S clamz pymazon

To obtain Clamz in Arch Linux, you must have yaourt installed. If you don't have yaourt installed or you are using another distribution of Linux than you can compile clamz from source code.

There is also a python based GUI named pymazon for those who don't enjoy using command line interface. Clamz and pymazon gives Linux users the freedom to use free and open source software to download DRM-free music.