Amazon downloading INCREDIBLY slow

[jameshof]

It is taking over an hour to download small albums (fewer than 10 songs)! Appears to be worse when downloading FLAC, faster with Atmos files.

[simchris]

Here in U.S. (Calif) seems to be sloooooow in morning. Then super speedy at night. Like 20x faster.

[jameshof]

Good to know! Yeah, WAVs, Atmos just as bad as FLAC

[jameshof]

Good to know! Yeah, WAVs, Atmos just as bad as FLAC

[jameshof]

Good to know! Yeah, WAVs, Atmos just as bad as FLAC

[jameshof]

Good to know! Yeah, WAVs, Atmos just as bad as FLAC

[jameshof]

Good to know! Yeah, WAVs, Atmos just as bad as FLAC

[simchris]

Some days, like today, morning works fine, but slow. I've actually started only doing a queue of 4-5 albums, otherwise times out eventually. The next day, might not restart telling me to login and select albums. So queue dies at some point (not sure if bug, or just how it is). Learning to take it slow. But I'm only getting the HD FLAC stuff of albums I have on CD, mostly. #TurtleMode

[jameshof]

You have managed a queue? I've always had to do one album at a time!

[simchris]

You have managed a queue? I've always had to do one album at a time!

Heh... yeah, I do about five albums at a time. Then stop.

[raymondj]

It is taking over an hour to download small albums (fewer than 10 songs)! Appears to be worse when downloading FLAC, faster with Atmos files.

I know, it's unreal. I noticed it the July 4th weekend, improved slightly. I do not see the certain times of the day working better than others. I have that goddamn "wrong version of chrome installed" keep popping up and here is how I got around it....it's actually a number of hoops that you have to jump through and I'll explain some. But just for yucks I installed MusicFab on my work Macbook Pro and it works much better. I don't know what could be the cause. Hardware wise - both Intel (i7 8 core or i9 quad-core). One has 8GB and the other 64GB, One has basic Radeon graphics and the other has the best that was available. Looking through the MusicFab.log and qef.log files there are tons of errors. Support ticket tells you to clear cache, turn off anti-virus. After you tell them that you've done this then they ask for MusicFab.log (I thought that was auto uploaded on submission of feedback) but I upload it anyway. Then they ask "which album or track is not working"......It's ALL OF THEM.

Here's what I do. I login to AmazonMusic with a valid Amazon account but one that is not a music account. From here I search and "try" to add things to the download queue. Sometimes, after hitting the green arrow and then MusicFab starts playing the music! You have to close the MusicFab Amazon tab, try again. The next time it will take forever but you will get to save to the download queue. Build up your downloads and then sign out of AmazonMusic from within MusicFab. Now...loging to MusicFab with your account that has full AmazonMusic. Once you login, you will get the chrome version error but just go ahead and start downloading. NOW....what you have to do is periodically go from the download progress window back to the AmazonMusic page and you will what your normal Music homepage is for about 3 seconds and then it will go to the "chrome error" page. That's okay - let the downloads keep going....but you will have to go back to the tab. Basically you cannot leave your computer unattended to download - even overnight - nothing will be downloaded. Now because of the "chrome error" you cannot add anything new to the download queue because you will constantly get the "chrome version error". Now here's where you have to be quick: close the AmazonMusic tab and then open it again but quickly move your mouse to the upper right corner, as soon as you see the "person icon" for amazon immediately click it. The drop down menu will happen but the main screen with go to the "chrome version error" - that's okay - the sign-out option is still there so you can successfully sign-out. Now, go back to your other account and do your searching. A paid AmazonMusic account has significantly more access to way more albums.

There is a lot more to this. A lot is simply that you know it's going to fail on the first time so do it again knowing it will fail somewhere else on the 2nd time, etc. Some tracks just timeout with the stupid error that we should contact them at MusicFab.

I would really love to get to the bottom of this. AmazonMusic is far superior to Apple Music. But why.....can AmazonMusic save as 334mbs M4A files but Apple Music always saves at 256mbs M4A - DON'T THEY BOTH USE ffmpeg internal to MusicFab? You can clearly see that if you import any of this music to the Apple Music app.

Today I finally switched both to Flac format to see what happens. If I want to import into Apple Music (and I do) then I run ffmpeg manually and convert from flac to alac. I have a bash script that will recursively do all files in relative short time.

I thought this "invalid chrome error" might be due to the wrong version of chromium installed but I checked both of my Mac's and neither have it installed locally (outside of MusicFab). Next I thought it might be some Chrome plugin but they get sync'd across all Mac's so why would one mac work and not another.

Lastly, installing MusicFab on a Mac with with MacOS Ventura - AmazonMusic does not work at ALL. Just the line going across never does anything.

I would LOVE to figure out this "chrome version error". Support is never going to know.


Now get this one!!! I F'ing HATE that any song on AmazonMusic that is rated "E" - it won't download! It will just skip it over. I had to mock-up some screen shots showing how an album (Rage Against the Machine for example) has 12 songs on it but when you click the "big green arrow" you only get 10 in the download list - and that is because 2 songs are rated "E". If you contact support, what happens is that they cache that page without the "E" values in place. So we have to do that for every album???? Probably 20% of albums have at least one "E" rated song (rock genre). I looked at the HTML DOM and it seems quite easy to "get around" this "E" rated song issue. Worse yet, Apple Music has NO problems with "E" rated songs. I realize that the HTML DOM is different from Apple Music and AmazonMusic.

There are so many simple gui errors on MusicFab MacOS. Try bringing the MusicFab window to the top of the screen....what happens??? The MusicFab window is now pinned - it cannot be moved. So many other stupid little things like checking a checkbox then hitting "Clear" and it leaves the checkbox checked after the clear.

If you look at all of the various files in the MusicFab directory there is a lot of "stuff" files with surnames, sqlite files. In my MusicFab.log file there are always a ton of "curl errors - host cannot be resolved" - what host??? My network is solid - I can guarantee that.