Digital Home Thoughts: Digital MP3 Downloads = Awesomeness...When They Work

It's funny how things work out sometimes - I took the screen sht above to illustrate how much I like the a-la-carte approach to music. Sarah McLachlan, one of my favourite female singer/songwriters, just released a double-disc best of album. I fired up the Zune software and compared all the songs I already owned, then purchased all the ones I didn't. Seemed perfect to me - until I realized that after purchasing seven total songs, only one had downloaded. I was using Firefox 3.0.3 to make the purchases, and each time I clicked on BUY MP3 I was given a download prompt for a file that would trigger the Amazon MP3 downloader - which is a bit odd, since usually single tracks are downloaded direclty as MP3 files. I checked the Task Manager, and the Amazon MP3 downloader process was running, but it was pegged at 25% CPU use - meaning it was locked up using 100% of one of the four CPU cores.

I killed the process, re-started the application, and I still didn't have my songs - it hadn't been queuing up the download either. I emailed Amazon support this morning, and within an hour I had a response and they re-enabled the downloads I was missing - and now I have all the songs I purchased. Words can't express how much I enjoy buying MP3s from Amazon, even with little glitches like this. I'm going to use the old tried and true Internet Explorer 7 in the future though to purchase music tracks, just to be on the safe side...