I have just purchased an mp3 (album) from the amazon mp3 store using Amarok, but instead of receiving a collection of mp3 files, as I expected, I have instaed received an an apparently useless and unplayable .amz text file. What is going on, and how can I get my mp3 files? Why were the mp3 files not downloaded directly into Amarok? I have never attempted to do this before, and may never again. What should I have done differently? I am using Fedora 17 32bit. Any advice welcome.

The .amz file is an encrypted list of URLs to download. You can open it and download the files with Clamz (which should be available from your distro repos) or a Python script I wrote for the purpose. (There is an official tool from Amazon to do it, but the Linux support is hopeless - the libraries it links to are very out of date.) Including support for opening the files in Amarok is on the todo list.

Thanks for your help, that resolved the problem. I first had to install the python-crypto package for fedora and then run the script in my home bin folder and everything worked fine. As you say the amazon linux support packages for downloading their mp3s are not working, due to the fact that they are very out of date.