Questions About Ubuntu One Music Store

[Rodney Dawes]

On Sat, 2012-11-03 at 02:02 -0500, Ma Xiaojun wrote:
> 1. Where is the discussion channel?
> I know this list may not be a good choice.

#ubuntuone on Freenode IRC.


> 2. Why is it available in English only?
> I find it annoying to find Chinese artists and songs using English names.
> I guess non-English speaking people may have similar feelings.

The store does not have stores for all regions, and in China
you perhaps may be seeing the world store. The songs and
artist names are probably translated in the store provider's
database for the other stores.


> 3. Why is it use patented MP3 format?
> There may be reasons.
> However, Rhythmbox behaves ridiculously when MP3 related stuff is not
> installed (the state after fresh install).
> It asked me for password twice and even got apport poped up later.
> I was too lazy to debug this and installed "ubuntu-restricted-extra" manually.
> ( I can use a VM with snapshot to try later )


Ubuntu/Canonical do not have any real control over the format
the tracks are in. But, MP3 is the only format that does work
absolutely everywhere. Some tracks are available in FLAC (and
possibly other formats) from the provider, but those are not
readily available through the Ubuntu One store, due to various
technical reasons. You can choose to install the MP3 codec
from within the Ubuntu installer when installing, and there
are several implementations available for install in the
standard Ubuntu repositories. I'm not sure exactly what
difficulty you had which caused apport to pop up, though.