Amazon’s MP3 Store is seriously ugly and none too easy to use. Thereupon, this application automates the transfer of downloaded music into iTunes, which together with Amazon’s Cloud Drive service is a big step forward and could represent a serious threat to iTunes.

The Amazon MP3 Store launched with great fanfare with generally lower prices. The giant online retailer’s music label partners hailed it as the first real iTunes competitor.

Well, it never really took off and prices on both stores are now generally about the same, though a little effort on Amazon can uncover good buys — loss leaders that come and go with the days. The part of the other problem — manually adding and cleaning up downloaded files — now has a solution.

Amazon MP3 Downloader 1.0 is now available and provides the following features:

• Support for multimedia albums — Albums that are marked “[+video]” or “[+digital booklet]” in the title include non-music items and require the latest Downloader. This latest version ensures that all items associated with an album, whether song, video or digital booklet, be grouped together when imported into iTunes

• Playlists — When you purchase a playlist from Amazon MP3, Downloader automatically imports the list of songs into iTunes, organized in a new, readymade, pre-named playlist

• Retry import — If an item fails to import into iTunes, you can now attempt the import again by clicking the “retry” button

• Retry download — If a download fails due to a network connection interruption, the Amazon MP3 Downloader now provides a retry button (a feature so nice, they list it twice)

• Improved messaging — There is now additional messaging indicating when various actions have been completed or errors have occurred

• Play — You can now hit “Play” next to any item that has completed to launch playback of that particular item in your default media player

With the launch of its Cloud Drive storage service, 5GB free and 20GB for a year if users buy an MP3 album, Amazon’s opened a new front in the battle for digital music dominance. Wisely, giant online reseller isn’t directly challenging iTunes or Windows Media Player on the desktop, choosing instead to make easier to buy music from its store and spread that joy via storage and mobile playback.

Get your copy of Amazon MP3 Download 1.0 here (2.3MB).