At least, semi-officially. The store is now in “public beta”.

Click through here to check it out.

Salient points:

• Tracks are encoded as 256Kbps VBR MP3 files, without any DRM restricting your ability to use them
• Most songs are 89 or 99 cents, compared to $1.29 for iTunes Plus
• If you buy an album, you must download it using Amazon’s MP3 Installer. You can download individual songs with or without the installer
• Amazon’s MP3 Installer will automatically add the song to iTunes or Microsoft’s Windows Media Player
• Downloaded songs should be compatible with any iPod, Zune or other MP3 player or device
• You should be able to burn downloaded songs to CD if you want
• At this time, I believe that only EMI and Universal are offering MP3
• DRM-free is not a license to scatter them far and wide across the Internet. When you buy, you agree to terms and conditions governing the use of this music.
• Of course, you can’t get a refund on an MP3 after you download it
• Amazon gives you a free sample song - Energy, by The Apples In Stereo - in order to try out the downloader
• On my test download, Amazon’s MP3 Installer downloaded the file and installed it into iTunes without any interruption in what I was currently listening to
• It appears that you cannot re-download a song once you’ve downloaded it (you can with the free song - because it’s free)

Either Amazon is trying to take the wind out of Apple’s iTunes sails and not taking any profit or the record companies are giving them a better price.

I checked out the sample song in iTunes and it looked quite normal:

I took a quick look at the tags in the sample MP3 file using Perl’s MP3::Info module and found nothing surprising there.

So, at first glance, if Amazon is hiding information identifying you in the MP3 file, it’s not storing it in an MP3 Tag. Even if they don’t hide any identifying information somewhere in the file, they could be watermarking the audio. It’s a bit hard to believe that the record labels would let their music out in the wild without some way to trace it back to the buyer.

I’ve just purchased Welcome Interstate Managers by Fountains of Wayne and it’s downloading now… the download manager downloads a single song at a time, showing the progress of the song and of the whole album. Songs show up in iTunes as soon as they’re downloaded. It’s easy to use and nicely done.
[tags]itunes, amazon, mp3, drm, drm-free, download, music[/tags]

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