So I’ve signed up for EMusic. Just my luck — with perfect timing, they’ve instituted a new download policy, whereby one has to use a proprietary download application — and it doesn’t work on Red Hat versions after 7.3; to quote their install instructions:
The Linux version of the Download Manager 2.0 was developed for Red Hat 6.2, 7.3 and Mandrake 8.1. Any flavors of Linux outside of these may not support the EMusic Download Manager 2.0. If you are having issues, we recommend that you switch your Linux flavor or OS in order to download with the EMusic Download Manager 2.0.
There’s two workarounds: use the Red Hat 7.3 shared libraries for system libc and libnss, as described by John Anderson of genehack.org here; or apparently, a local proxy can be used as long as you use the IP address of the proxy in the emusicdlm app — not the hostname.
I’m conflicted now; I was about to go recommending this service to all and sundry, but
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it really makes the Linux version a hell of a lot harder to run. (I hope they fix that, at least). Previously, it was simply ‘right click to download’, which is insanely easy and simple.
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more worryingly — in my experience, this kind of ‘tightening up’ is often symptomatic of a company running out of cash and spiralling ’round the plughole, IMO. :(
On the good side, once I downloaded and set up the genehack hack^Wworkaround, it’s now working perfectly.
I’ve just downloaded an album from their service in about 3 minutes (at 400Kb/s), first try, and the tracks are all crystal-clear VBR MP3s. Now that’s nice…
(PS: -1 for whichever glibc genius decided to change the libnss API
incompatibly.)