I recently read an article that Amazon has increased in It’s MP3 music sales to now make it the number online music retailer. It now stands in a place to be an actual challenger to the online music sales giant iTunes.

After recently having to deal with iTunes after my wife recieved a gift card, I thought that I would make a purchase from Amazon MP3 to compare the two.

My experience with iTunes left me less than happy as I had to use someone’s Windows computer to complete the purchase. In addition I was stuck getting the media in a lower quality AAC format. Sure I was able burn it to CD and rip it to my home computers hard drive but is that really necessary?

Shoot I’ve received better quality free garage band music from dowload.com music.

My experience with Amazon was a bit different. I searched and found some songs that I wanted to purchase. After selecting to purchase them I was initially bothered by the fact that I needed to install a download program to receive them. I thought, “great now another program that I’m going to need to try to install using Wine.” I was pleasantly surprised that Amazon supports Windows, Mac and four Linux distributions (Ubuntu, Debian, Fedora and openSuse).  It was a quick and easy .deb install and I was ready to rock-and-roll. The client seemed to work in a similar manner as a bit torrent client and the music was easily downloaded and purchased. Best of all it was in a high quality MP3 format. I would have preferred .ogg but MP3 will do in a pinch.

In the future I think I will do all my music purchases through Amazon. It was quicker, easier and they provided me with the product and services that I wanted.