stumbled, by coincidence, over a new online music store: MP3Tunes. they don’t have the main stream junk (who wants that anyhow?) but do have interesting independents — even old acquaintances such as david nevue are listed! it’s another of michael robertson’s ventures (he started the original MP3.com that vivendi universal acquired in 2001, and which they subsequently closed down — the current MP3.com has since been acquired by CNET). buying music at MP3Tunes is quite simple and they don’t seem to make a distinction between US and non-US customers. once you buy a song (at USD 0.88 a track) or a complete CD (at USD 8.80) they are instantaneously available in the “MP3Tunes locker” — this is where it becomes a bit awkward: you have to download each track individually! one by one…hmph…a pity really, as their MP3 quality is quite nice and the offering is quite interesting…hmmmm…wonder whether we can do something about this…

first a look into the terms and conditions (emusic.com, for example, had a clause that expressively forbids you from using any download tools not approved by emusic.com): nothing in there that prevents us from rolling our own tool…so, let’s see…the login for the mp3tunes locker takes places via a web form, not too keen on going that route…i try accessing the locker URL using wget, providing it with access to my firefox cookies file: that works fine, i get the locker overview…a close look at the HTML source of the page reveals that it contains URLs pointing to the individual albums, it seems. i try one of them, and, bingo, we get the list of tracks! all of this does require that you’ve logged in to the mp3tunes locker with firefox first (and obviously mp3tunes passes out a cookie to you to signal that fact)…using the knowledge gained i write a little perl script that will take a look at my mp3tunes locker, figure out which files are new and download those…works nice