One feature is on the lips of everyone excited about Ubuntu 10.04 ‘Lucid Lynx’: the new Ubuntu One Music Store.
Ubuntu Music Store will let us purchase music inside the desktop music player
More pertinently, what form it will take.
At the Ubuntu Developer Summit the basics of how integration between online music store and desktop music player will take shape got fleshed out.
No actual music partner was announced, but for Canonical to be pushing this, there must already be one lined up, ready to go.
For now, we don’t officially know who but, if you read to the end, it’s easy to work out…
Back to the store itself and Ubuntu’s devs say it be implemented similar to that of the 7Digital store in the (oft-forgotten) cross-platform, open-source music player Songbird.
In fact, those at the meeting were very keen to emphasis the similarity, which you can see in the screenshot above and compare to the Ubuntu Design team’s mockup, shown to potential music store partners, below:
In essence, there’ll be a web-browser integrated into Rhythmbox which loads the ‘Store’ whenever the ‘Store’ item is clicked on in the side panel.
Users will then be able to browse the store, see music they already own, and easily purchase and download new tracks directly in-app, without needing to leave it.
Signing in to the store will be done using existing UbuntuOne credentials. In a manner of speaking, Ubuntu is merely acting as the “third party” between you and the music vendor directly – not that it seems it given the store will be Ubuntu-branded.
Your credit card and payment details will not be stored anywhere so, from what I gathered from the meeting, you may need to re-enter them any time you want to make a purchase.
All music will be downloaded to the default location of your ~/Music in your home folder.
Syncing your music via computers will be an option thanks to UbuntuOne and there will be no restrictions on a user doing this with their purchased music.
It’s unclear however how ‘sharing’ will work on tracks bought from the store given that would be, essentially, illegal in some countries. (The UK is proposing to change its copyright laws to allow “reasonable” sharing between friends.)
So, who is the partner?
No formal announcement has been made, but this snatch of a mockup shared during the meeting has pixelated the name of the partner out. It’s doesn’t really take genius to work it out given there was a LOT of emphasis on 7Digital in the meeting…
…which, when overlaid on the blurred pixels…
It is likely it is 7Digital who will be used as the backend of the Ubuntu One Music Store, just don’t say I told you ;)