@Doofy... Thanks for the info. I implicitly understood that the matching process would only upgrade the version stored in the cloud leaving the 128k version on the PC. I'm down with that. Now, if they actually did push the higher bit rate version down a person's local PC... now that would be a marketing angle that would set them apart from the rest of the cloud-storage options available elsewhere!
Anyway, even if it took me a year and a half to re-download my entire library from the A-cloud after some catastrophic event wiped out music library along with my own easily accessible backups I would imagine that it would still be a couple orders of magnitude quicker and cheaper than me figuring out how to re-acquire all that stuff from scratch.
Actually I was just thinking about my physical CD collection this past weekend. As I said, a vast majority of it is ripped at 128k with only a handful at a more substantive bit rate. If my house were to be broken into and the thieves decided to make off with my collection of CDs (along with my bottle-cap collection and whatever easily fenced valuables they can get) I would be somewhat mollified because I would still have my digital rips of those same CDs but that would be quixotically offset by the fact that my rips are all at 128k and therefore not a very good substitute for the real thing and I would no longer have the real thing available for re-ripping. That got me thinking about how to logistically tackle a re-ripping process so that I have actually do have higher bit rate backups of my CD collection. And then you threw out that fact that the A-cloud has just the kind of feature I could exploit for this issue; I wouldn't have to spend time loading CDs into the drive tray and manually re-ripping them and would instead simply need to queue up a series of downloads of stuff back to my local PC.
Back to reality: estimating >99 hr import time. Yow.
We shall see. Seems to be saying it couldn't match some 15K out of 25K songs, which would be inexplicable. Thinking about it, there are some things I may as well have excepted from the import, eg, Live Music Archive stuff. But not 15K worth...
The importer actually stalled, and I called support. Answer: restart the Importer! That is also the answer to the "How do you sync?" question.
@thom, while I had them on the line, I asked your question about rights. She said "Since we had rights at the time, the files wouldn't be deleted."
Interesting discussion as I have been thinking about this. As I no longer have an office, I keep all three of my external drives at home - a bit silly really, so I'll need to work out an alternative for one, especially as I also have lots of photos I wouldn't want to loose besides the music. Like many in this discussion many of my own CDs have been ripped at 128K. I'm actually in the process of re-uploading at both lossless and 256K, the second as my ipod capacity is only 30GB, but it is a slow process.
I had a 2TB drive for backups that I misplaced during our vacation last year (seriously, I hid it in case anyone broke in and forgot where I hid it). So I ended up buying a 3TB USB3 drive to take it's place. Then my wife found the original one. Long story short (too late) I'm either going to start rotating them at my office, or sync one once a month and keep it there while the other one acts as my "live" backup (that I can run out the door with).
Regarding digital rights at amazon, I've uploaded a bunch of things that amazon doesn't sell digitally, like random things from soundcloud or bandcamp or stuff I made myself, and some things that nobody sells digitally, like Black Sabbath's Paranoid and Fripp and Eno's No Pussyfooting, and they all went to the cloud fine.
Oddly enough, I uploaded a version of Paranoid that had some skipping tracks, but when I downloaded it, all tracks played fine. That was my intention when I uploaded, but then I thought that they wouldn't upgrade something that they didn't sell as mp3.
I'm curious to try vinyl rips; I haven't yet. I had a vinyl rip of Van Halen, that I burned to a cd, and when I put the cd in my other computer, iTunes recognized what it was. I would think that amazon might too.
Which makes me wonder; what if I made white noise mp3's have matching song titles and lengths to some album? Would amazon match it? (I think I may have asked that question before)
Bah. Importer buggy as hell. Sometimes just stops, sometimes endless cycles on "importing" the same set of songs. I'm a couple hundred songs ahead of where I was last night. Just re-started for 3rd time today.
@amclark2 - I don't know if anyone has said that out loud, but most of us have probably thought it. Want a new album? Just copy and rename some other songs of the same size and Amazon will give it to you free! Obviously not legal or ethical, but it would certainly be fun to try.
Well I don't trust any of this cloud shit. The Chinese govt shut down the internet during the Olympic games a few years back, and I can see it happening here, no matter what rights we Americans think we have. We only have what they give us. I used to have an office, but now it's a safety deposit box. At least it's offsite.
AMZ cloud update: Poking along. Importer more or less works, have had to restart a few times. Each restart it seems to match a few more songs.
Main thing I did not realize is that all songs available in the mp3 store are *not* matched. In my extensive jazz library, ECM and, even worse, Blue Note, do not appear to match. Verve does.
You should tell it where to find files, rather than scan computer. Can always go back later and scan for missing stuff. Would have been good to consolidate library before starting import.
In total, about 40% of my library matched. I reckon it will take a couple months to upload the rest. I will allow, it's fun to sign onto the cloud and see all my music (slowly) show up.
One week later - a little more than half of my library is in the cloud. But that's not as good as it sounds, because it includes the songs that were matched. Thus it has taken about a week to upload perhaps 10% of my music. After skipping around at first, the importer is going through albums in alpha order, and is still not through the A's! (Though it started with numbers, and the A's include albums starting with "A" and "An.")
I say again, it never occurred to me that many albums available in mp3 store wouldn't match! Lack of Blue Note matching in particular is killing me. Could it have to do with the fact that I removed all those "(2000 Remaster, RVG Edition)" tags...?
Running more smoothly now - With the importer running, you can't do much else with the computer. An unanticipated benefit is that I'm finally forcing myself to do get used to doing work stuff on the iPad so I can let the important do it's thing on the laptop. Running nonstop, it would take perhaps 5 more weeks to complete the upload. Probably wouldn't have gotten into this if I'd realized that (which I should have) - Certainly wouldn't have done it if the cost weren't negligible.
I'm an amazon cloud subscriber too; I use it as a secondary backup to my external hard drive, and I just recently ordered a new 1tb hd so I could keep one at home and one at work.
I had been really loving the amazon cloud for the cloud app; after some initial bugs got worked out, it allowed me to download anything from my cloud onto my phone and listen right away. Well, it was downloading slowly, so I decided to update the cloud app; huge mistake! (As updates usually are). Now all the albums in my cloud are weirdly split up into multiple albums and the track sequencing is all screwed up. So none of my albums work like albums anymore. It's something with the app because the cloud from my computer is fine.
And then, since I couldn't download to my phone anymore, I had to actually connect my phone to put music on it, and to do that I had to update iTunes. Which I hate doing because it always causes problems/ sucks more resources.
Will someone please invent an update to something somewhere that's actually an improvement instead of a ploy to make me need new hardware?
Hey, I'm in the B's! (Bach) Lots of 'Best ofs' to get through. I am seeing the split-up albums, presumed it had to do with mismatching tags. Importer actually seems to be running better since upgrade this week.
If I had an office to take an HD to, I might not have gotten myself into this mess! Furthermore, part of the idea was that I wanted the extra backup before doing a needed upgrade on the music computer, (naively) not realizing how long the upload was going to take.
AMZ Cloud update: Almost done, finally. So that has been close to 8 weeks to match and upload nearly 30K tracks.
As noted above, biggest disappointment is that it didn't match as much as I expected. Indeed, it seems to make a point of leaving off a few tracks off even those albums that are matched. Whether that's licensing or strategic, who knows? In any case, don't count on using it for wholesale replacement of lower bitrate albums.
Also, the uploader and (abysmal) "Cloud Player for PC" seem to have issues dealing with large libraries. Which is kind of a joke, considering the 250K "limit" for premium subscribers. I suppose it's possible matching could work better in smaller bites, will test that as I clean up the cloud library.
But for all of that, still seems worthwhile as a negligible-cost cloud backup option. After upload is finished, will finally be able to get some use out of it!
Wow that is a long time, but seems to be close to my own experience with uploading my library. I finally gave up because of the annoying process, especially the way the uploader had to rescan my library. I really liked the Google music uploader, especially for its ability to work in the background and for the option to throttle back bandwith. I haven't tried it lately, but I remember how disappointed I was about playing back my music on Google. Amazon's website seemed much more responsive (though not perfect).
The rescanning was a PITA - the upside was that it seemed to match a few more songs each time. Once down to the last few (five) thousand, it ran flawlessly...it might help to do the upload in smaller pieces.
Interested to see how it performs now that the upload is done. Worked perfectly yesterday on my phone, DL'ing and playing an album. Also wonder if performance might improve over time, as cloud becomes a more common option for playing music.
The Amazon site does seem a bit more responsive, but I like the look and feel of Google's more. I just wish they would add more search capabilities (they are Google after all). Of course I'm down to less than 100 songs I can upload to them and that hard limit is going to start bothering me. At this point I would probably happily pay 7 or 8 bucks a month for unlimited music and unlimited (or 100k+) uploads. Otherwise I might just do the Amazon cloud anyway because $25/year is so cheap.
@BN - AIFF is similar to WAV (uncompressed and lossless). If you want to keep the quality high, I'd recommend downloading the FLAC converter and running it through that - there is a graphical frontend and it's fairly easy to use. I recommend using level 5 for compression as you don't save much space beyond that.
Wait, looked it up. Winamp should support this. I found this info on a thread in the Winamp forums:
Ctrl+P > Plug-ins > Input > Nullsoft Waveform Decoder > is Aiff highlighted/selected in the list?
If the extension is aif or aifc, then you'll need to add those to the "Additional Extensions" field.
Anybody know how to fix favicons in IE 10? I usually have several tabs open all the time. For some reason, the other day the emusic tab started displaying the tab from my local library. So instead of showing the gray & red dots, it's displaying a little sunflower. This is extremely annoying!
Jut like the problem discussed here, but deleting browsing history hasn't fixed it.
Yeah, not sure why this just showed up, but then nobody else with the problem knows, either.
The common answer for IE was to do this, but it didn't work for me:
From Internet Options> General> Browsing history> Delete, uncheck "Preserve favorites website data" at the top and delete the Temporary Internet Files.
I had to actually go to some Temporary Internet Files directory, delete everything there, and restart IE.
C:\Users\~username~\AppData\Local\Microsoft\Windows\Temporary Internet Files
I know I read the answer to this question somewhere previously, but I'm not seeing it. Kind of a noob question actually...
I've always downloaded via eMusic downloader to my laptop. I have a very old version of the eMu downloader.
I want to begin downloading some stuff to my Macbook. If I put the eMu downloader on the Macbook, obviously it will be the current version of the downloader. When I subsequently log in on my laptop and try to download there, it won't cause any weirdness with my account right?
I mean, I understand that the downloader is an app, and it resides on my computer. Just because I have one version of the downloader on one computer, doesn't mean it changes anything on the other computer. I'm just curious if there's some sort of potential conflict on my account when I try to download an album.
Y'know, actually, this question actually sounds even dumber than noob. Someone please just confirm for me that I won't fuck anything up by having two different eMu downloaders on two different devices under the same eMu account. Because I'm a little concerned that if eMu forced me to upgrade to the current version on my "main" computer, it might not work with how things stand right now (old operating system, eMu audio player doesn't work still, etc).
Y'know, it's weird. I'm actually rather tech savvy at work. I'm able to take on moderately difficult problems and apply some critical thought to them, and then make a decision to act with plenty of confidence.
But sit me in front of my own computer, and all the confidence drains right out of me.
I have 2 different computers using 2 different versions of the DLM to DL music from the same account. Actually, until recently, 3 different computers, each with possibly a different version.
I probably have old versions of the DLM, if you'd like me to look
Comments
Anyway, even if it took me a year and a half to re-download my entire library from the A-cloud after some catastrophic event wiped out music library along with my own easily accessible backups I would imagine that it would still be a couple orders of magnitude quicker and cheaper than me figuring out how to re-acquire all that stuff from scratch.
Actually I was just thinking about my physical CD collection this past weekend. As I said, a vast majority of it is ripped at 128k with only a handful at a more substantive bit rate. If my house were to be broken into and the thieves decided to make off with my collection of CDs (along with my bottle-cap collection and whatever easily fenced valuables they can get) I would be somewhat mollified because I would still have my digital rips of those same CDs but that would be quixotically offset by the fact that my rips are all at 128k and therefore not a very good substitute for the real thing and I would no longer have the real thing available for re-ripping. That got me thinking about how to logistically tackle a re-ripping process so that I have actually do have higher bit rate backups of my CD collection. And then you threw out that fact that the A-cloud has just the kind of feature I could exploit for this issue; I wouldn't have to spend time loading CDs into the drive tray and manually re-ripping them and would instead simply need to queue up a series of downloads of stuff back to my local PC.
Thanks again for the info.
Regardless, I'm in the process of figuring out what CDs of mine aren't ripped to FLAC so that I can finish the job.
We shall see. Seems to be saying it couldn't match some 15K out of 25K songs, which would be inexplicable. Thinking about it, there are some things I may as well have excepted from the import, eg, Live Music Archive stuff. But not 15K worth...
The importer actually stalled, and I called support. Answer: restart the Importer! That is also the answer to the "How do you sync?" question.
@thom, while I had them on the line, I asked your question about rights. She said "Since we had rights at the time, the files wouldn't be deleted."
Oddly enough, I uploaded a version of Paranoid that had some skipping tracks, but when I downloaded it, all tracks played fine. That was my intention when I uploaded, but then I thought that they wouldn't upgrade something that they didn't sell as mp3.
I'm curious to try vinyl rips; I haven't yet. I had a vinyl rip of Van Halen, that I burned to a cd, and when I put the cd in my other computer, iTunes recognized what it was. I would think that amazon might too.
Which makes me wonder; what if I made white noise mp3's have matching song titles and lengths to some album? Would amazon match it? (I think I may have asked that question before)
Main thing I did not realize is that all songs available in the mp3 store are *not* matched. In my extensive jazz library, ECM and, even worse, Blue Note, do not appear to match. Verve does.
You should tell it where to find files, rather than scan computer. Can always go back later and scan for missing stuff. Would have been good to consolidate library before starting import.
In total, about 40% of my library matched. I reckon it will take a couple months to upload the rest. I will allow, it's fun to sign onto the cloud and see all my music (slowly) show up.
I say again, it never occurred to me that many albums available in mp3 store wouldn't match! Lack of Blue Note matching in particular is killing me. Could it have to do with the fact that I removed all those "(2000 Remaster, RVG Edition)" tags...?
Running more smoothly now - With the importer running, you can't do much else with the computer. An unanticipated benefit is that I'm finally forcing myself to do get used to doing work stuff on the iPad so I can let the important do it's thing on the laptop. Running nonstop, it would take perhaps 5 more weeks to complete the upload. Probably wouldn't have gotten into this if I'd realized that (which I should have) - Certainly wouldn't have done it if the cost weren't negligible.
I had been really loving the amazon cloud for the cloud app; after some initial bugs got worked out, it allowed me to download anything from my cloud onto my phone and listen right away. Well, it was downloading slowly, so I decided to update the cloud app; huge mistake! (As updates usually are). Now all the albums in my cloud are weirdly split up into multiple albums and the track sequencing is all screwed up. So none of my albums work like albums anymore. It's something with the app because the cloud from my computer is fine.
And then, since I couldn't download to my phone anymore, I had to actually connect my phone to put music on it, and to do that I had to update iTunes. Which I hate doing because it always causes problems/ sucks more resources.
Will someone please invent an update to something somewhere that's actually an improvement instead of a ploy to make me need new hardware?
If I had an office to take an HD to, I might not have gotten myself into this mess! Furthermore, part of the idea was that I wanted the extra backup before doing a needed upgrade on the music computer, (naively) not realizing how long the upload was going to take.
As noted above, biggest disappointment is that it didn't match as much as I expected. Indeed, it seems to make a point of leaving off a few tracks off even those albums that are matched. Whether that's licensing or strategic, who knows? In any case, don't count on using it for wholesale replacement of lower bitrate albums.
Also, the uploader and (abysmal) "Cloud Player for PC" seem to have issues dealing with large libraries. Which is kind of a joke, considering the 250K "limit" for premium subscribers. I suppose it's possible matching could work better in smaller bites, will test that as I clean up the cloud library.
But for all of that, still seems worthwhile as a negligible-cost cloud backup option. After upload is finished, will finally be able to get some use out of it!
Interested to see how it performs now that the upload is done. Worked perfectly yesterday on my phone, DL'ing and playing an album. Also wonder if performance might improve over time, as cloud becomes a more common option for playing music.
I have found an excellent album by Jason Kao Hwang on Soundcloud but its in a a fileformat called Aiff Audio and is not playable in Winamp or WMP.
Does anyone know if these files can be converted to either mp3 or Flac and how to do it ?
- It's some quite heavy files, 10 minutes is something like 100 mb.
I'm getting this myself, so will investigate further! I'm a fan of Taylor Ho Bynum
ETA, confirming that it works in iTunes (at least Tk 1)
Wait, looked it up. Winamp should support this. I found this info on a thread in the Winamp forums:
Ctrl+P > Plug-ins > Input > Nullsoft Waveform Decoder > is Aiff highlighted/selected in the list?
If the extension is aif or aifc, then you'll need to add those to the "Additional Extensions" field.
Let me know if that works for you.
It actually worked, aiff was on the list in blue but i typed aiff;aif;aifc in the Additional Extensions field and Bingo !
I can't get the player to show the cover but I guess I can live with that.
Jut like the problem discussed here, but deleting browsing history hasn't fixed it.
The common answer for IE was to do this, but it didn't work for me:
From Internet Options> General> Browsing history> Delete, uncheck "Preserve favorites website data" at the top and delete the Temporary Internet Files.
I had to actually go to some Temporary Internet Files directory, delete everything there, and restart IE.
C:\Users\~username~\AppData\Local\Microsoft\Windows\Temporary Internet Files
I've always downloaded via eMusic downloader to my laptop. I have a very old version of the eMu downloader.
I want to begin downloading some stuff to my Macbook. If I put the eMu downloader on the Macbook, obviously it will be the current version of the downloader. When I subsequently log in on my laptop and try to download there, it won't cause any weirdness with my account right?
I mean, I understand that the downloader is an app, and it resides on my computer. Just because I have one version of the downloader on one computer, doesn't mean it changes anything on the other computer. I'm just curious if there's some sort of potential conflict on my account when I try to download an album.
Y'know, actually, this question actually sounds even dumber than noob. Someone please just confirm for me that I won't fuck anything up by having two different eMu downloaders on two different devices under the same eMu account. Because I'm a little concerned that if eMu forced me to upgrade to the current version on my "main" computer, it might not work with how things stand right now (old operating system, eMu audio player doesn't work still, etc).
Cheers.
But sit me in front of my own computer, and all the confidence drains right out of me.
I probably have old versions of the DLM, if you'd like me to look
I'm sure there would be no problems. I just couldn't stop myself from posting from some vague sense of paranoia.
Cheers.