eMusic Download Manager on Linux

I previously discussed some of my trials with Amazon's Download Manager on Linux. Today I'm going to talk about eMusic's Download Manager. eMusic is a music subscription service which began way back in 1998. At first it consisted entirely of independent artists, as eMusic distributes all their music in mp3 files without DRM. Over the years they have picked up more and more labels and now have a decent selection. Certainly there are many labels and artists that they don't have (especially some very popular ones or as the music snobs say "mainstream" artists), but if you are more interested in just finding some new music to enjoy rather than always looking for a specific artist you heard on the radio, then it is a great deal.

The way eMusic is setup is that you get some number of track credits every month for a subscription fee. Throughout the month you can select and download individual tracks or whole albums. Selecting an album to download is really just a convienent way to download multiple tracks. The basic concept of the downloader is the same as with Amazon's (it downloads stuff, duh!) but eMusic's download manager is implemented with Mozilla's XULRunner application framework. In my mind this is the Right Way to do this. eMusic isn't a software company, they are music service company. They provide a downloader to make things easier on their customers, but allow those customers to help them out by keeping it open source. By using XULRunner it seems as though they get good cross-platform performance and consistancey "for free."

The other thing that I think they do right is that they distribute the Linux downloader in a distribution agnostic way: by tar.gz and .bin (self-extracting archive) files. And there is nothing preventing distribution from rolling a package with this tar.gz file for better integration with their setup. Contrast this to Amazon's downloader, where I had to use the rpm2tgz utility in an effort to get around some library issues. Don't get me wrong, I certainly wouldn't be opposed to eMusic putting out packages, as long as that tar.gz option was always there.

Ok on to the application itself. There isn't much to it really. It accepts a specially formated file from the eMusic website (by clicking the download button on the webpage) and downloads the files. And that is pretty much it. There is apparently the ability have add ons, similar to Firefox but I haven't been able to play with it. Which brings me the one problem I have with it. From what I can tell I should be able to browse the eMusic website in the downloader, but I can't. It seems as though none of the HTML browsing functionality is working. As such when I click "get extentions" in the Add Ons dialog, nothing happens. When I click "Go To Emusic" on the opening screen, nothing happens. But it downloads my tracks and as that is all I really care to use it for, it works for me. Also I believe the Windows version (and possibly the Mac OS version) have a syncing feature to automatically add the downloaded tracks to your preferred Media library, but that is missing on the Linux version. Again this doesn't bother me as all I want is something to easily download my eMusic tracks.

So overall I'm happier with the eMusic Downloader than with Amazon's Downloader, in spite of still having issues with reduced functionality. At least with the eMusic downloader I feel that I have a better chance of solving my issues than with a closed application. It is just in this case, it already does what I want it to.