Clamz is a little command-line program to download MP3 files from Amazon.com's music store. It is intended to serve as a substitute for Amazon's official MP3 Downloader, which is not free software (and therefore is only available in binary form for a limited set of platforms.) Clamz can be used to download either individual songs or complete albums that you have purchased from Amazon.
Clamz is free software. Please see the COPYING file for more information.
A reminder that there is ABSOLUTELY NO WARRANTY OF ANY KIND for this program. See the COPYING file if you find this in any way unclear. USE THIS PROGRAM AT YOUR OWN RISK!
Clamz uses the libraries libgcrypt, libcurl, and libexpat. As such, you must have these libraries, including the "development" files, installed on your system prior to installing Clamz. The exact package names vary between distributions.
Debian: install the packages libgcrypt11-dev, libcurl4-gnutls-dev or libcurl4-openssl-dev, and libexpat1-dev.
Fedora: install the packages libgcrypt-devel, curl-devel, and expat-devel.
To compile clamz, untar the source package and run the following commands:
./configure
makeTo install, run (as root):
make installWhen you buy a single song from Amazon, you have the option to either download it in your web browser (the default behavior) or via the MP3 Downloader. When you buy an album, Amazon gives you no choice: you must enable the MP3 Downloader.
To enable the MP3 downloader in the web store, visit the following URL:
http://www.amazon.com/gp/dmusic/after_download_manager_install.html?AMDVersion=1.0.9
(Ignore all the instructions on that page, of course.) This works by setting a cookie in your browser; it seems to be completely separate from your Amazon account. If you are outside the US, replace 'amazon.com' with the corresponding domain for your country (e.g., amazon.co.uk for the UK, or amazon.fr for France.) Amazon does not allow anyone to purchase MP3 files from outside their country of residence.
In any case, when you actually go to download the file(s), if the appropriate cookie is set you will be directed to open or download an AMZ file. This file is basically just an encrypted list of URLs plus additional information (artist, title, and so forth) about the songs.
Save the AMZ file somewhere, and run clamz on it; by default this will just download all of the linked files into the current directory. More control over where the files are downloaded and how they are named is available via the command line, as well as the configuration file, ~/.clamz/config.
Let's hope there aren't any. If you do encounter a problem, here's what to do:
Keep a second copy of the AMZ file. Clamz will automatically save a copy in the ~/.clamz/amzfiles/ directory. Be aware, however, that if you try to use Amazon's official MP3 Downloader to open the AMZ file, it will automatically delete the file after reading it! Make sure to keep an extra copy around -- it will be useful in figuring out what went wrong.
Clamz keeps detailed logs of its interactions with the Amazon web servers; these are stored in the ~/.clamz/logs/ directory. These log files may also be useful in figuring out what went wrong.
Use clamz -i to print out the details of the AMZ file, if possible. There are basically two ways Amazon might try to break Clamz: by changing the AMZ format, or by blocking Clamz from their servers. In the former case the format will need to be reverse-engineered anew. In the latter case, though, you may be able to download the files by other means, such as through a web browser.
Please report any problems you encounter. You can use the Clamz bug tracker (http://code.google.com/p/clamz/issues/list), or contact me directly at floppusmaximus@users.sf.net.
Version 0.5 -- 2011-10-23
Version 0.4 -- 2010-04-30
Changed the User-Agent string, to accomodate Amazon's UK servers. Clamz should work fine with the Amazon UK store, but as I personally have no way of testing it, your bug reports are always appreciated!
Interactions with the server are recorded to a log file, stored in the ~/.clamz/logs/ directory.
When clamz is launched directly from a web browser, files are stored in the desktop "music" directory by default. (This is normally defined in the file ~/.config/user-dirs.dirs if you are running a desktop environment such as GNOME or KDE. If not, $HOME/Music is used instead.)
File names may include the user-dirs variables ($XDG_DESKTOP_DIR, $XDG_MUSIC_DIR, etc.), and may include conditional variable expressions (${foo:-bar} and ${foo:+bar}), similar to shell variable expansion.
Improved curl error reporting.
When resuming a partial download, the progress display takes the existing portion of the file into account.
Non-ASCII characters are handled better in the progress display.
Version 0.3 -- 2010-03-31
Added MIME info and desktop files for GNOME/KDE/etc. Your web browser should offer to launch clamz when you download an AMZ file (you may want to edit the settings in ~/.clamz/config beforehand.)
Fixed an old bug that caused clamz to fail when an absolute path is specified.
Added 'OutputDir' option to specify an output directory from the ~/.clamz/config file.
Added missing initialization code to placate libgcrypt.
The variables ${amz_title}, ${amz_creator}, ${amz_asin}, and ${amz_genre} have been deprecated; this information is no longer supplied in current AMZ files. The (essentially equivalent) variables ${album}, ${album_artist}, and ${album_asin} can be used instead, but there doesn't seem to be any "album genre" field.
Added -r option to resume a partially-completed download.
If an error occurs while downloading, automatically retry up to 5 times.
Thanks to the many users who have sent in their suggestions and bug reports! Particular thanks go to Jim Radford for his helpful suggestions and patches regarding several of the above issues.
Version 0.2 -- 2008-10-10
Fixed a rather serious bug preventing clamz from parsing certain amz files.
Added -x option to dump raw XML (thanks to Dan Lenski for this addition.)
Made configure script more aggressive.
Version 0.1 -- 2008-03-26