Free Software and Digital Music March 3
Recently I suffered a logorrheic episode about Free Software. In the mean time two things have changed:
- I have installed Rockbox on my iPod.
- Amazon has released a non-free GNU/Linux client for their MP3 store.
With Rockbox, I’m using free software when I use my iPod, but there are other benefits than ideological purity. Rockbox supports many players, so I can easily buy a new mp3 player and get the same features I’m used to with my current device. The main feature I like with Rockbox is that the device maintains its own database. To install music on it, I only need to copy the files. My Ipod appears as a normal USB disk. This means I can use rsync to automatically keep my iPod as a mirror copy of all my music. When I go to a new machine, I can use rsync to copy all my music off just as easily. In this way, my Rockbox-powered iPod becomes an exact mirror of my music collection. Since I’m using Emusic (and now Amazon) to buy mp3s, keeping backups is very important to me.
The second question is the acceptability of Amazon’s downloader program. It is non-free software, but I’ve allowed it. The reasoning is the following: it enables a single transaction. When that transaction is over, it gets out of the way. I don’t need to use the program ever again. If in the future, Amazon does something to violate my rights, I just uninstall the program and keep using all the old mp3s. I don’t really see this as materially different from using their web page (which has javascript on it and as such executes code on my computer).
As a practical matter, I will only buy mp3 albums from Amazon when it is cheaper than buying the CD used (including shipping).