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Logitech Chief Executive Guerrino De Luca says his company’s dance with Google TV was a “big mistake” and says it will stop producing the set top box.

The Verge website quotes De Luca as saying the introduction of the Logitech Revue with Google TV “cost us dearly” and when supplies are sold out, that will be it for the ill-fated venture.

It is estimated that Logitech spent about US$100 million on the product and has little to show for it. While some other companies, notably Sony, are still selling Google TV boxes, the little Apple TV is still in stores and apparently satisfying buyers, even if it hasn’t been a blockbuster hit either.

The second-generation Apple TV, announced in September of 2010, has experienced much better sales success than the original model. The reason? Most likely it’s because of the addition of other services like Major League Baseball and Netflix. Apple says it has sold more than 2 million of the units so far.

Now rumors are flying that Apple will produce a complete TV solution, and quotes in the recent Steve Jobs biography have added to the speculation that something might be on the way.

[via The Verge]

Logitech drops Google TV, leaving Apple TV as dominant player originally appeared on TUAW – The Unofficial Apple Weblog on Sun, 13 Nov 2011 11:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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If you’ve ever wanted to download Amazon MP3s via Terminal or over ssh, or ever found yourself unable to use the “Amazon MP3 Downloader.app” then I have good news for you: there is another way.

The problem

Amazon’s MP3 Store annoys me to no end. I love the deals that they occasionally offer, but in order to download the files, you have to download the Amazon MP3 Downloader. Inside that dmg file is an installer application that doesn’t use the normal .pkg format.

The special installer failed to install the application on my Mac. I managed to install it manually (as well as the plugin that needs to be installed to “/Library/Internet Plug-Ins/”), but then the application kept crashing after each song.

So, to recap, Amazon doesn’t use the standard package installer, and their installer failed to work; and they don’t use normal downloads, and their non-standard downloader failed to work. This is why you should stick to standards — they’ve been better tested for a lot longer than your “roll your own” solution. Stop reinventing the wheel.

The “.amz” file that you download from Amazon is an XML file which includes a download URL, but you can’t access that URL to download the music directly. I was all ready to start sniffing TCP headers and try to figure out what special headers the Amazon MP3 Downloader.app uses, when the same thought occurred to me: “Don’t reinvent the wheel.”

The solution

I was able to find the solution on Google code, specifically at http://code.google.com/p/clamz/ which is described as “is a little command-line program to download MP3 files from Amazon.com’s music store.”

Side note: I needed to install ‘libgcrypt’ in order to get clamz to build, which I did using Homebrew simply by typing brew install libgcrypt (assuming you already have brew and Xcode installed). The clamz page also mentions libcurl and libexpat, but I those were already installed on my Mac.

Once I had the necessary libraries installed, installation of clamz was as simple as the instructions on its homepage:

 tar xfvz clamz-0.5.tar.gz  cd clamz-0.5  ./configure  make  sudo make install  

Then I just had to get a “fresh” .amz file from Amazon. To do that, I went to the Amazon Cloud Player, clicked the checkbox at the top to select all my music (see #1 below) and then clicked “Download” (see #2 below):

Note that if you have more songs than will fit on one page, you may have to do this repeatedly for each “page”. I only have 230 songs in my Amazon Cloud Player.

That downloaded new “.amz” file on my computer called “Amazon-MP3-1321140421.amz” (yours will be named something similar but different). Then I ran this command simple command:

 clamz --output-dir=~/Music/ ~/Downloads/Amazon-MP3-1321140421.amz 

and watched with sheer delight as clamz downloaded all of my Amazon music files. I accidentally closed my MacBook Air before it was finished, but was able to resume the download simply by adding the –resume flag:

 clamz --resume --output-dir=~/Music/ ~/Downloads/Amazon-MP3-1321140421.amz 

When it finishes, you can delete the .amz file, as the links it contains will expire anyway. You can always download another one later.

Thanks, Internet

This simply would not have been possible without the help of the open source community, both the developer behind clamz (Benjamin Moody) and the awesome folks behind Homebrew.

After I finished using clamz I also found pymazon, but I’m not sure if that works on Mac.

Since I criticized Amazon’s non-standard downloader, someone might say “Well, iTunes is a non-standard downloader, too!” That’s a valid point. If I had been trying to download from iTunes and it failed to work, I would not have been so fortunate to find an open source solution.

Download Amazon MP3s in Terminal with clamz originally appeared on TUAW – The Unofficial Apple Weblog on Sun, 13 Nov 2011 09:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Apple has released a third beta of iTunes 10.5.1 to members of its developer program. According to Apple, “iTunes 10.5.1 beta 3 includes a number of important stability and performance improvements for iTunes Match, and is a required update for all subscribers to iTunes Match beta.”

This beta update comes just after developers’ iTunes Match libraries were wiped “as we prepare for the launch of iTunes Match,” Apple said in an email to developers. This latest beta comes less than two weeks after the release of iTunes 10.5.1 beta 2, while 24 days passed between the release of the initial iTunes 10.5.1 beta and its successor.

Accelerating beta releases from Apple are usually indicative of an imminent public launch, but it remains to be seen whether 10.5.1 beta 3 has shaken out enough of the bugs to warrant more widespread release.

Once the service goes live to the public, users who pay US$24.99 per year will have access to virtually all of their music, anywhere, and anytime.

iTunes 10.5.1 beta 3 released with more fixes for iTunes Match originally appeared on TUAW – The Unofficial Apple Weblog on Sun, 13 Nov 2011 00:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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