$20 is probably worth it. I have to say though their uploading software is tedious though, at least compared to Google's that runs in the background, starts uploading by itself, and has many options such as deciding how much bandwidth to use. Each time you have to let Amazon's Uploader rescan your music library before uploading and you then have to click upload once it's finished. It will pause after awhile too at least for me though that might have something to do with power saver settings on my iMac.
Sorry to hear about your hard drive. I had a backup external HD go bad, but thankfully I knew it was going before I lost anything permanently.
Just saw this article that lays out the features of Apple's iTunes Cloud storage. The track limit, rather rigid music library controls for iOS devices makes me glad that I'm not going to use it.
Thanks for that link, cw00. My goodness. iTunes match actually sounded useful to me when it came out, and I had it mentally filed away as something to check out when I had time. Especially the idea of getting better bitrate versions of tracks and being able to play from the same library at the office were attractive. But reading this article it sounds hideous. First I have to delete a bunch of stuff from my library to even be eligible if I am over 25,000 tracks (no idea how many I actually have, but it's rather a lot) and then have to keep deleting as I buy new stuff unless I buy it from iTunes, which is not happening. Then it deletes the carefully curated ecology of tracks on my iPod Touch and I have to then remember to download whatever I want to listen to when offline, so that the access is basically cloud-only? No thanks.
Thanks for saving me some time.
It is very useful, thanks. I had been thinking about going down the itunes cloud route, as neither Google Cloud or Amazon Cloud are not yet available to us. I'll wait until Amazon cloud comes here before progressing further. I hadn't realised that I would have to loose music, for example.
Amazon needs to allow some sort of tag-editing once the files are uploaded. I have a hard time sorting through genres, since there are either a zillion variations (thanks AmieStreet) or everything is tagged Reggae (thanks eMusic).
Plong, so edited tags are preserved after uploading, correct? I'm finally thinking of doing this, if only for backup purposes...My library is getting to the size of yours, or within an order of magnitude!
Be careful editing tags. I have several albums that appear multiple times, each with some of the tracks. I suspect this is due to my non-standard use of the Genre tag, separating multiple genres with the pipe symbol, e.g. Christmas|Rock, although I never bothered to examine the tracks that became separated from their fellows. I would like to be able to get them all in the same album, and be able to edit tags of tracks I bought directly to my cloud drive.
@Doofy - yes, whatever you upload is preserved, I have uploaded a few albums with bad/missing tags, so I deleted them and re-upped them after making the changes.
@Dr. Mutex - I think there is a well documented "bug" in the Amazon uploader that creates multiple copies of albums, sometimes three or four copies. Search the amazon help / support for this. there is a work around, and either they have fixed it or I have been lucky lately.
A major frustration is is that albums get broken up if the tags are slightly different for each track - as happens on the big 99 classical collections. Sometimes it is only one or two tracks, but that is enough to make it hard to find what I want. The work-around is to search for the album, but that is not the best solution. I want to be able to edit the offending tag.
I hope that Apple loosens up a bit, but I can least shop around. I have my library mostly up on Google, but it is just not a great playback experience, at least the last time I tried. Am sloowwwwly uploading music to Amazon's cloud.
Amazon's album art algorithm needs work. That second to the last album seems to be wrong. OTOH, Amazon is letting post bootlegs, or at least not noticing that I am adding live concert bootlegs to the Amazon Cloud.
@amclark2 Was just about to post that too. This makes me feel better about the slow annoying process of uploading my music to their cloud. It also makes me hopefully that Google might get on it, maybe. I know though they don't exactly want people to use Apple products instead of Google product. s
Updates to Cloudplayer today....they have added "search for past purchases" and "upgrade to 256kbps" quality, but more importantly they now allow editing of metadata. They ahve a music match feature as well.
Sadly it also looks like they have changed the TOS so that "unlimited" now means "250,000 imported songs," rather than unlimited. In fact, I just noticed the button whch used to say 'upload" now says "import."
No Last.FM support yet, but the scripts should still work.
/Update - I just edited the artist for a classical album I bought years ago and forgot I had....20 tracks at once. Fixed the Artist and Genre.
I have spent a bit of time this afternoon updating some genre tags on Amazon cloud, and the system works pretty well. The real source of my frustration is AmieStreet. I made the dubious decision to upload my Amie directory to the CloudService when I got the "unlimited"" level, but now I am plagued with stupid genre listings which make no sense at all.
For example: what is "Alternative/Electronic/Ambient/Folk/Folk Rock/Experimental/Psychedelic/Indie Rock/Soundtrack" supposed to communicate? (and before you say it, no, it was not Crimson Razorback or Prose in Rosette.
Man, you got that right - when I decided to clean up my genre listings in my iTunes library last year there were all kind of whackadoodle listings, mostly courtesy of Amie, whom I admit I still miss. On the other hand the existence of said categories made it easier to find some, hmm, questionable acquisitions which were consigned to backup drive purgatory in order to make room for brighter shinier faces.
This appears to be one of the many sites online seeking to scam people out of payments for entering the "Green Card Lottery". I read the target page - even if not legally fraudulent it is willfully misleading (e.g. "official USAGC Organization web site" - official for that organisation, perhaps., but it is not an "official" organisation; "when you win" - there is no way a third party company like this can increase anyone's chances of gaining a green card; etc.). See e.g. this page for an explanation of issues involved: http://www.fraudaid.com/scamspam/lottery/green_card_scam/index.htm.[/url]
It reflects badly on your site that you would carry this kind of advertisement.
ETA: I already sent the Amazon email, but should have added that the statement on the usagc site that "In order to win the American Green Card Lottery to Live and Work in United States, you are required to enter the following information." is an outright falsehood and basically phishing. No giving of information to any private company has any bearing on anyone's chances of "winning" a Green Card under the diversity program.
ETA2 - sorry to divert the thread - I did stumble on this while going to look at the cloud player changes, and it roused my ire.
And back on topic, I clicked on the import link in cloud drive and downloaded their uploader and when I try to install it I get "This application cannot be installed because this installer has been mis-configured. Please contact the application author for assistance."
So I wrote to them again.
Emusic are not the only ones who launch things that don't work. Though I suspect this will be fixed rather quickly.
No upgrades for me so far (but I haven't actually uploaded anything into it). But it is searching for past purchases. That would be nice. I know there's at least one of those random comps that I bought for 99 cents that somehow got lost in the ether. If it will take 250k songs for $25/year, I might just start using it as a backup site. Even though I use Backblaze, you can never have enough backups...
Is anybody else seeing this? The new Amazon downloader seems to have created a new and redundant file structure, including multiple duplicate copies of the Amazon mp3 and iTunes music files. (Fortunately, only a small percentage of my music is in the folders that got duplicated.)
Still looking at this, but not happy. Seems like a major, major f*ckup here. Have yet to get in touch with them, thought I'd poke around a bit first. If you use the new cloud downloader, don't let it auto-add to iTunes. (Though not positive that will avert the problem.)
This device does not currently support multimedia downloads.
Add this item to your Wish List and you can view and purchase it from your computer.
Continue shopping Amazon MP3.
Well that's just the dumbest thing ever. "We're sorry, we don't want to take your money now because you can't download directly to your phone. Nevermind that you can actually download directly to your phone. Don't make an impulse purchase. Think about it, then go home, drag out your ancient dinosaur computer, take 15 minutes to boot it up, and purchase then. If you can find the time."
I do not notice any redundant files, my downloader is set to "do nothing" after the file is downloaded.
"don't let it auto-add to iTunes"
I think that is a pretty good policy for any download manager (emusic, 7digital or whatever). I hate it when these programs insist on adding things to iTunes, mostly because the download to their own directory and copy the files into the iTunes library.
I'm still digging into this, but I really think the AMZ downloader must be responsible. Possibly because it already saw a "My Music" folder, so thought it had to create a new one ("My Mus~") ??? Kind of a mess.
Waiting to hear back from Amazon...If this is happening, I am probably not the only one. I would never trust the eMu downloader to auto-add! Thought it was safe to let Amazon do so, now I know better.
I feel the same way about the fact that the Amazon shopping ipod/ipad app allows you to purchase many a thing from the Amazon store - except Kindle books. It lets you find them but not click "buy", so you have to wishlist it, leave the app and fire up a browser and find the book. So you can buy it from the device but only as long as you are not using Amazon software to do so. And all this should be unnecessary because there ought to be in-app browse and purchase in the Kindle app.
GP - that is annoying, but for some reason they even disabled my ability to purchase mp3's in the browser, and they did that just a couple of weeks after finally coming out with an iPhone app. So, I used to be able to purchase on my phone, but had to use a computer to download. Now I can download to my phone, but I have to use a computer to purchase!
I just checked using a free book, and I can still purchase and download kindle books on my phone, although I still have to purchase from the browser.
Well I ended up on the phone to Amazon tech support twice today. They got the uploader to work for me but told me their DLM is basically not working right now for a bunch of people and I'll have to wait until they find a fix before I can download the album I just bought, unless I want to download it one track at a time. Makes a change to spend half the afternoon wrestling with Amazon's tech instead of emusic's.
Comments
Sorry to hear about your hard drive. I had a backup external HD go bad, but thankfully I knew it was going before I lost anything permanently.
Thanks for saving me some time.
@Dr. Mutex - I think there is a well documented "bug" in the Amazon uploader that creates multiple copies of albums, sometimes three or four copies. Search the amazon help / support for this. there is a work around, and either they have fixed it or I have been lucky lately.
A major frustration is is that albums get broken up if the tags are slightly different for each track - as happens on the big 99 classical collections. Sometimes it is only one or two tracks, but that is enough to make it hard to find what I want. The work-around is to search for the album, but that is not the best solution. I want to be able to edit the offending tag.
Amazon's album art algorithm needs work. That second to the last album seems to be wrong. OTOH, Amazon is letting post bootlegs, or at least not noticing that I am adding live concert bootlegs to the Amazon Cloud.
Sadly it also looks like they have changed the TOS so that "unlimited" now means "250,000 imported songs," rather than unlimited. In fact, I just noticed the button whch used to say 'upload" now says "import."
No Last.FM support yet, but the scripts should still work.
/Update - I just edited the artist for a classical album I bought years ago and forgot I had....20 tracks at once. Fixed the Artist and Genre.
For example: what is "Alternative/Electronic/Ambient/Folk/Folk Rock/Experimental/Psychedelic/Indie Rock/Soundtrack" supposed to communicate? (and before you say it, no, it was not Crimson Razorback or Prose in Rosette.
Dear Amazon,
You are running an advertisement (presently here: http://www.amazon.com/MP3-Music-Download/b/ref=topnav_storetab_dmusic?ie=UTF8&node=163856011) for usagc.org (the ad links to: http://html3.usagc.org/step1landing_eng.html?afk=AdmagEneng&PUBLISHERID=167493&CAMPAIGN_ID=913122&CREATIVE_ID=15541823&SITEID=&CLICKURLENC=&SOURCEURLNEW=http://www.amazon.com/mp3-music-download/b/ref=topnav_storetab_dmusic?ie=utf8&node=163856011&SELLER_BILLING_CODE=&CREATIVE_CODE=&SELLER_LINE_ITEM_CODE=167493)
This appears to be one of the many sites online seeking to scam people out of payments for entering the "Green Card Lottery". I read the target page - even if not legally fraudulent it is willfully misleading (e.g. "official USAGC Organization web site" - official for that organisation, perhaps., but it is not an "official" organisation; "when you win" - there is no way a third party company like this can increase anyone's chances of gaining a green card; etc.). See e.g. this page for an explanation of issues involved: http://www.fraudaid.com/scamspam/lottery/green_card_scam/index.htm.[/url]
It reflects badly on your site that you would carry this kind of advertisement.
ETA: I already sent the Amazon email, but should have added that the statement on the usagc site that "In order to win the American Green Card Lottery to Live and Work in United States, you are required to enter the following information." is an outright falsehood and basically phishing. No giving of information to any private company has any bearing on anyone's chances of "winning" a Green Card under the diversity program.
ETA2 - sorry to divert the thread - I did stumble on this while going to look at the cloud player changes, and it roused my ire.
So I wrote to them again.
Emusic are not the only ones who launch things that don't work. Though I suspect this will be fixed rather quickly.
Some upgrades for me....!
Still looking at this, but not happy. Seems like a major, major f*ckup here. Have yet to get in touch with them, thought I'd poke around a bit first. If you use the new cloud downloader, don't let it auto-add to iTunes. (Though not positive that will avert the problem.)
Well that's just the dumbest thing ever. "We're sorry, we don't want to take your money now because you can't download directly to your phone. Nevermind that you can actually download directly to your phone. Don't make an impulse purchase. Think about it, then go home, drag out your ancient dinosaur computer, take 15 minutes to boot it up, and purchase then. If you can find the time."
"don't let it auto-add to iTunes"
I think that is a pretty good policy for any download manager (emusic, 7digital or whatever). I hate it when these programs insist on adding things to iTunes, mostly because the download to their own directory and copy the files into the iTunes library.
Waiting to hear back from Amazon...If this is happening, I am probably not the only one. I would never trust the eMu downloader to auto-add! Thought it was safe to let Amazon do so, now I know better.
I feel the same way about the fact that the Amazon shopping ipod/ipad app allows you to purchase many a thing from the Amazon store - except Kindle books. It lets you find them but not click "buy", so you have to wishlist it, leave the app and fire up a browser and find the book. So you can buy it from the device but only as long as you are not using Amazon software to do so. And all this should be unnecessary because there ought to be in-app browse and purchase in the Kindle app.
I just checked using a free book, and I can still purchase and download kindle books on my phone, although I still have to purchase from the browser.