I'm hoping they'll pull the lala trick of virtual matching of one's library. That means "instant" partial personal library cloud, at a cost of just a streaming service.
It would be nice if they automatically imported your old Amazon purchases, too. Or at least had a nice way of telling them to put an album you bought from there previously "in the cloud". Wait, let me check...
Hmm, in one area it says that Amazon mp3 purchases never count towards your space and in another I see, "Songs purchased from Amazon MP3 and saved directly to your Amazon Cloud Drive never count toward your storage limit and are always stored free of charge." They know what I've purchase from them, what's the difference if I tell them to put it in the cloud now or later?
Also, anyone else find this line funny: "You have 5.0GB of Cloud Drive storage. Upload your entire music collection." That's going to be seriously compressed...
Buy an MP3 albumget 20 GB of storage free for a year
Purchase an album from the Amazon MP3 Store and we'll give you 20 GB of storage free of charge for one year from the date of your purchase. That's enough space to store up to 4000 songs. You can keep your 20 GB storage plan after the year is up or do nothing and we'll drop you down to our free 5 GB plan. Don't worryyou will never be charged for storage space unless you choose to upgrade to a paid storage plan. Learn more about the 20 GB promotion
1. Check the box next to the file you wish to download.
2. Click on the "Download" button
3. Your browser will present you with a dialog with download options.
It's not written explicitly, but it seems that the cloud drive will allow you to back up and recover downloads. Perhaps it's not as cost effective as an external HD, mountains of DVDs or online backup, but it's something.
Um, so they think 20GB is adequate? ... OK, so scrolling down, it would cost me $200/year to use this for my music collection, and I know I am small fry compared to some on this board. Not looking so attractive. How, apart from spending a load of money, do I not end up with an Amazon cloud that contains some arbitrary and immediately dated subset of my music? (Oh, I get it, buy all of my music at Amazon so that it doesn't count against the limit. So no more emusic, netlabels, ebay CDs, etc. This actually strikes me as potentially a very smart way, for them, of biasing future purchases in their direction for people who get invested in their cloud.) The free 5GB might work just as a convenient way of making a playlist or two available across locations...or as tenmporary holding space so things can be downloaded at work and retrieved at home or vice versa...
If it was available to me - which it isn't,I've already checked - I'd need to register under multiple identities. I can see that it might just about work for the stuff I have purchased from Amazon as that might just about be 5 GB. Is this first of more? Now if there was an emusic cloud with many times the size that might help overcome no redownloads
It's already got me thinking: if a company with the size and propensity to giveaways of Amazon feels a need to charge $1 per GB, is the emusic version either going to be very lame or very expensive? Or only for past emusic purchases with no other upload capacity?
This was a surprise to me as well. I am not really a cloud kind-of-guy, preferring to have something I can point to and say "I own that CD." Still, I like Amazon so I tried the service out - I bought the Norah Jones album for $2.99, uploaded it to the Cloud Player, then promptly dloaded it to copy to my iPod. I streamed it and it sounded fine on the crappy little desktop speakers I have, so no complaints there. Bit rate is VBR, so not the typical 256K Amazon standard (although they might have changed that some time ago). I did notice that the comment field had an Amazon Song Number inserted.
An advantage is that music bought from Amazon does not count toward your GB limit, so every $3.99 special I buy can be copied there, and to my local drive as well. I will think of it as a backup of Amazon purchases. If they allow previous purchases, that is even better. I seriously doubt I will upload any of my existing library to Amazon unless they allow for previous Amazon purchases.
I bought an iPad recently and enjoy streaming Pandora, so if Amazon manages to get an iPad app in the iTunes store, this could be cool. What I fear is that every digital music provider will create their own cloud and then have proprietary software that prevents a single app which can read all my various clouds with a single player. I want my Amazon, eMusic and Guvera Clouds to merge into a single library. I cannot see that happening very soon.
@plong42: Yes it could be a little like the problem of various brands of instant messaging programs. A smart programmer could maybe come up with a universal player app/website though. Maybe.
I want my Amazon, eMusic and Guvera Clouds to merge into a single library.
Exactly. For me a factor starting to come into play here is cognitive cost. Even if stuff is free in dollars, every additional service that I need to keep track of and organize to my liking adds to my cognitive load (and steals that mental energy from other tasks). Yesterday, prompted by the other thread here, I briefly considered starting up scrobbling on my last.fm account to join the party. Then I thought - another thing to pay attention to. Not just now. With some of this stuff the cognitive cost (= cluttered mind and life) is adding up quicker than the dollars.
Well I uploaded an album that I'd downloaded at work and then downloaded it at home. No problems. So this will at least work as a mechanism for days I forget my USB stick (transferring files to which is still faster than uploading/downloading).
@Plong42 - Amazon's encoding can vary, but the majority of their mp3s (at least the ones I've purchased) are VBR V0. And all of them have "Amazon.com Song ID XXXXXX" in the comment field. So it certainly doesn't look like any changes to the files.
Sorry, it's been going around inside my head all day. Outside of having an added backup for Amazon purchases I just don't know what it will do for me - listening on my laptop at work, or streaming for that matter, just isn't how I listen to stuff during the day, and if I'm home I already have all the options at hand.
It looks like it will be a while before we get this in the UK and the rest of the EU as our copyright laws are different
It is not known what agreement, if any, Amazon has reached with the four major record companies, regarding users uploading copies of their music.
Making online copies of tracks is known as format shifting. While the practice may violate copyright, in the US, it is generally defensible under the principle of fair usage.
The same rules do not apply in the UK - meaning, for example, it is technically a breach of copyright law to copy music from a CD onto an MP3 player.
However the music industry has generally turned a blind eye to users copying legally purchased music, not least because of the difficulty in policing infringement.
If Amazon Cloud is to launch in the UK, the company may have to address those issues, say lawyers.
"I am guessing that what they are doing in the US is using the fair usage laws that cover format shifting," said Brett Farrell, a technology and media lawyer at Barlow Robbins.
"Technically you do not have the right to format shift in the UK.
"If a major player moved into town and wanted to encourage format shifting then I think the record companies would use that as a way of getting them to the negotiating table," he said.
I was about to use the free 5gig to free up some hard drive space, but then I looked at the terms of service, and they don't guarantee safety of your data. I've also been considering Carbonite which is roughly $60.00 a year for unlimited data. But . . . they don't guarantee the safety of your data. I've got a back up drive at home that doesn't guarantee safety. Why bother with the cloud.
As for the amazon music cloud - why no iphone app? I have and use a kindle app for my iphone. Has apple boxed them out of the cloud?
My prediction for the emusic cloud is that it will basically re-allow re-downloads at a price. We take it away with the right hand, and sell it back with the left. emusic; that shady cousin your parents always tried to steer you away from.
@amclark2 - If you want a company to guarantee anything, you're going to have to pay a lot more than 5 bucks a month. I use a "cloud" backup (switched to Backblaze after Mozy screwed its customer base) because the alternative is relying on a couple drives that are either all located in my house or have to be manually driven to another location. Not saying that Amazon's Cloud makes sense, but that doesn't negate the usefulness of the technology.
No, I get that a guarantee would be more expensive, but cloud backup already is more expensive. For roughly the same amount I could get one year of carbonite or a 1tb backup drive. But the backup drive will keep working, where I have to pay every year for the cloud. By the time I'm five years in, I could have 3 drives and a fireproof safe. I really should get a drive to keep at the office though - right now everything's at home.
Is it odd to say that the thought of starting over has an odd attraction though? I'd never throw it all out, but what if it were gone, and I had just some faceless insurance check and I had to start over from scratch by remembering what I liked?
But that's the gamble you're taking - that it will keep working. While there's no guarantee with cloud storage, I know that a place like Backblaze can have approximately 20% of their drives fail without losing any data. You're not likely to get those odds at home.
The only reason I'm pushing this point is because I have lost data a few years ago. While much of it was backed up to other drives, a big portion of more recent stuff was still being backed up. And the drive wasn't being accessed or anything at the time. It was just sitting next to my computer when the head crashed. Now my important files are regularly backed up to a local external drive, but they are continuously backed up elsewhere, too.
Just to weigh in, I was out of town when this topic hit, and already feel like there has been too much discussion to catch up. Dammit, I missed the cloud!
OK, I now see that the AMZ cloud is going to be great for DL'ing daily freebies. You can listen before deciding if you want to DL, plus you can "buy" on one computer and DL to another. If I never got any other use out of it, would be worth it for that...
@Doofy - I had thought of that, although I wish they would allow for past purchases to go into their cloud as well. I have a several of those huge Classical samplers they practically give away that would be nice "in the cloud" so I could listen in various places.
Anyone who wants to fill their cloud with freebies, check out the new-ish look singe page for free tracks and samplers. You can purchase with one click and page-back fore more.
Has anyone figured out if there is a way to change downloading preferences? It seems like you have to go to your cloud to download any purchased music. Maybe I just need to update my downloader.
If you go to "Your Account", scroll down to "Digital Content". Then click on "Your Amazon MP3 Settings". There you can decided how to handle the downloading.
Comments
Hmm, in one area it says that Amazon mp3 purchases never count towards your space and in another I see, "Songs purchased from Amazon MP3 and saved directly to your Amazon Cloud Drive never count toward your storage limit and are always stored free of charge." They know what I've purchase from them, what's the difference if I tell them to put it in the cloud now or later?
Also, anyone else find this line funny: "You have 5.0GB of Cloud Drive storage. Upload your entire music collection." That's going to be seriously compressed...
http://www.amazon.com/gp/help/customer/display.html/?nodeId=200653250
It's not written explicitly, but it seems that the cloud drive will allow you to back up and recover downloads. Perhaps it's not as cost effective as an external HD, mountains of DVDs or online backup, but it's something.
An advantage is that music bought from Amazon does not count toward your GB limit, so every $3.99 special I buy can be copied there, and to my local drive as well. I will think of it as a backup of Amazon purchases. If they allow previous purchases, that is even better. I seriously doubt I will upload any of my existing library to Amazon unless they allow for previous Amazon purchases.
I bought an iPad recently and enjoy streaming Pandora, so if Amazon manages to get an iPad app in the iTunes store, this could be cool. What I fear is that every digital music provider will create their own cloud and then have proprietary software that prevents a single app which can read all my various clouds with a single player. I want my Amazon, eMusic and Guvera Clouds to merge into a single library. I cannot see that happening very soon.
Sorry, it's been going around inside my head all day. Outside of having an added backup for Amazon purchases I just don't know what it will do for me - listening on my laptop at work, or streaming for that matter, just isn't how I listen to stuff during the day, and if I'm home I already have all the options at hand.
Source http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-12890677
As for the amazon music cloud - why no iphone app? I have and use a kindle app for my iphone. Has apple boxed them out of the cloud?
My prediction for the emusic cloud is that it will basically re-allow re-downloads at a price. We take it away with the right hand, and sell it back with the left. emusic; that shady cousin your parents always tried to steer you away from.
Is it odd to say that the thought of starting over has an odd attraction though? I'd never throw it all out, but what if it were gone, and I had just some faceless insurance check and I had to start over from scratch by remembering what I liked?
The only reason I'm pushing this point is because I have lost data a few years ago. While much of it was backed up to other drives, a big portion of more recent stuff was still being backed up. And the drive wasn't being accessed or anything at the time. It was just sitting next to my computer when the head crashed. Now my important files are regularly backed up to a local external drive, but they are continuously backed up elsewhere, too.
Anyone who wants to fill their cloud with freebies, check out the new-ish look singe page for free tracks and samplers. You can purchase with one click and page-back fore more.