UbuntuOne music store live
Ubuntu’s new iTunes-like music store is now in public beta, ending months of speculation about Canonical’s musical intentions. The music store has been in closed beta for the past few months and was only released publicly with the release of the first Ubuntu Lucid beta last week.
The UbuntuOne Music Store, for now, is presented as a plugin for Rhythmbox, the default music player in Ubuntu Linux, although other media players will be supported in later releases.
Canonical, the company behind Ubuntu, has partnered with music retailer 7digital and has developed the Music Store software so that it integrates with both Rhythmbox and UbuntuOne, its cloud storage service.
Using the store is fairly straight forward. With the plugin installed the store appears in the left-hand bar of Rhythmbox, alongside other music retailers. Clicking on that brings up the main interface on the right-hand side with a default list of recommended and popular artists. There is also a search bar and various methods of browsing the collection: by artist, recently added, new releases and so on.
Clicking on individual albums brings up a track listing with the option to listen to a piece of each song as well as a button to buy either a song or the entire album. At this point songs and albums can be purchased in Euros or US dollars but most downloads are not available to South African users yet. Because of 7digital’s various licensing agreements sections of its inventory are only available to certain geographic regions. There is also a bug in the store at present that makes the “World” store unavailable in many areas, but this is being worked on according to developers.
The integration with UbuntuOne comes into play when users download purchases. The songs are downloaded by default into the user’s UbuntuOne account. This means that the songs are automatically synchronised with the user’s online storage space as well as with all of their PCs running UbuntuOne. The songs can then also be accessed via the UbuntuOne web interface.
The idea is good but the one problem is that UbuntuOne offers just 2GB storage space by default which is not going to hold a great number of songs.
Users can purchase additional space but it adds to their costs.
One of the challenges for the UbuntuOne Music Store is the file format.
Songs are provided in MP3 format by default which is a restricted format and one not natively supported by Ubuntu. Which means that while users can download songs in MP3 format they will have to install additional non-free software to be able to listen to them. The good news, however, is that the songs available are provided without DRM restrictions.
UbuntuOne music store << discussion
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