Sunday, March 30, 2008

Amazon's Music Store on Ubuntu Gutsy

Unfortunately, there are some CDs that are so obscure nobody is seeding them on BitTorrent. One of these happens to be Hicksville by Celtic Cross. I decided to give the Amazon Music Store, where this CD is available for purchase, a shot.

On Ubuntu Gutsy, there are a few things you need to do to make this work. The first, of course, is to download the .deb package from this page. Install that with sudo dpkg -i amazonmp3.deb or sudo dpkg --force-architecture -i amazonmp3.deb if on a 64 bit system. You're also going to need a few Boost libraries: sudo apt-get install libboost-date-time1.34.1 libboost-thread1.34.1 libboost-iostreams1.34.1 libboost-signals1.34.1 If you're on a 32 bit system, launching the /usr/bin/amazonmp3 binary should now work (it also inserts an entry in the GNOME panel under Applications->Internet).

But for all you 64-bit'ers out there, there's a bit more work to do. Launching the binary fails with the message "amazonmp3: error while loading shared libraries: libgtkmm-2.4.so.1: cannot open shared object file: No such file or directory". This is because amazonmp3 needs 32 bit libraries, not 64 bit ones (see this thread). Download getlibs, a bash script which installs 32 bit versions of libraries on 64 bit systems. Install the package with sudo dpkg -i getlibs-all.deb and then run getlibs /usr/bin/amazonmp3 to install the 32 bit libraries. The program should now run without error.

The application, by the way, is quite minimalistic. I don't know why they put users through this trouble and don't just send you a tarball of the music files. I guess there might be some reason on other platforms where it integrates with other applications... not on Linux, though!

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