Buy one MP3 album and get 20 GB storage seems like a good deal. Amazon Beats Apple And Google To Cloud-Based Music Storage/Streaming Well, the rumors were true. Not only is Amazon entering the “music locker” space, they’re doing it before both Google and Apple — as their “Cloud Drive” and “Cloud Player” have just gone live on their site tonight. Cloud Drive is the name Amazon is giving to its media storage space on their servers. They give you 5 GB of storage for free and allow you to access the media from any computer. Cloud Player is the name of yes, the actual player. And it comes in two flavors: a player for the web, and one for Android devices. You’ll note an absence of an iOS player… A bit more: Any album bought through Amazon MP3 is stored for free in your Cloud Drive — a very nice perk. If you buy one album from Amazon MP3, they’ll upgrade your Cloud Drive storage to 20 GB for free for a year — another nice perk. Normally, 20 GB of Drive storage will cost $20 for a year. 50 GB is $50. 100 GB is $100. And so on. All the way up to 1 TB for $1,000. The Cloud Drive storage isn’t just for music — Amazon notes that 1 TB will hold 70 hours of HD video. Other files can be uploaded — this includes music, movies, photos, and even documents. The MP3 uploader accepts MP3 or AAC files, but they must be DRM-free (.wma, .wav, .ogg and others are not supported) Old Amazon MP3 purchases aren’t put in your Cloud Drive, only new purchases going forward (though you can manually upload). The Android Cloud Player is built into the Amazon MP3 app — it’s in both the Android Market and Amazon’s new Appstore. This is for U.S. customers only for the time being. Cloud Player for the web works on IE 8 and above, Firefox 3.5 and above, Chrome, and Safari. There is no Opera support. And Flash is required (but for uploads only). There’s also a stand-alone uploader app for Mac and PC. You can’t upload music from your mobile device “at this time”. So there you go, Amazon has won the race of the big three to deliver a fully cloud-supported music option. Current whispers have Google launching something very similar at their I/O conference in May. And Apple is working on a similar concept as well — but it may not launch until this fall. At least that was the original plan, Amazon’s move may alter things, obviously.
Just saw this. Pretty cool. Music are usually peoples most important data. But 5 GB is a good amount for any type of data. Not sure how expensive cloud space is but Amazon uses its economy of scale to make it cheap for them
Been uploading songs all night to this, streamed it to my phone to listen to before going to bed. Awesome. I'm hesitant to dump any more than the 5 GB up there, because I don't think I'll want to pay the extra 20/yr after the first free year is over. (I already pay 25/yr to flickr for photos, but I use that more than I will probably use Cloud Drive). Maybe if amazon had a photo sharing site like flickr I'd pay more, but it's an interesting idea. Interested in seeing what Google and Apple have up their sleeves. Sidenote, Amazon's been very Android-friendly this week. Releasing the "Amazon App Store" last week and now the Cloud Player in the Amazon MP3 app.
Apple and Google also have this in the works. Amazon decided to jump the gun in order to get publicity by being the first to announce. They haven't even finalized deals with record labels yet. But if doing this helps them become a viable 3rd option to the big 2, good deal.
they're taking the tack they don't need licenses for this (relying on the MP3tunes case). it's just online storage, and the streaming is just for songs users already own.
So is the "cloud" like an online hard drive that you could access from different places like home and work? Is it like dropbox except you're not using your devices' hard drive space? How safe is that? I'm no computer expert, but wouldn't that be pretty easy to hack?
When I first saw this I was pretty psyched but it looks like you'll have to manually upload, it won't sync with a folder you have on your hard drive like dropbox. Even though it's more space, 5GB compared to 2GB for the free version, I don't think I'll be using it as much. The comparison to Dropbox may not be entirely fair though. I don't think it's meant to be used the same way. It's primarily for your playing music from the cloud and they added support for other file types just because they could. Also, no iOS support? That's A LOT of people that are missing out on this service. The site uses https so its 128-bit encrypted, like your online banking. Basically, it's as safe as your amazon account so if no one has gone through and ordered stuff from your amazon account, you'll be safe. In order to be safe, make sure you log off from any public computer.
new stuff purchased from Amazon MP3 is automatically stored. stuff you already purchased you have to upload. buy one album, get immediately upgraded to the 20GB plan.
What is the big deal about this? Cloud storage has existed for years. The only thing different maybe about this is that you can stream your music to your device but that requires internet connection anyway. Why not just store it on your phone's memory? No risk of your music getting cut off or whatnot.
I don't think the cloud is meant to replace your phone's memory, it's more of a complement for exactly the risk you said. The cool thing about the cloud is you have access to EVERYTHING. My iPhone has 32GB but my iTunes library is 145GB (movies and tv shows too) and it would be nice to have access to all of it all the time. Also, I don't want to have my phone's capacity full. My buddy ran into this problem the other day when trying to record a video but ran out of space on his phone.
I have some online storage, but Amazon catering it towards music like this, and at this rate, is encouraging. What are the upload speeds like, for those that have started to use it? Maybe now isn't a good time to test it, though.
Question: Does amazon have to store multiple copies of the same media file on its servers? In other words, if two people buy Rebecca Black's new album from amazon so they can listen to "Friday" while kickin' it in the backseat, would it be possible for them to both be streaming from the same 1's and 0's?
takes forever to upload... I'm using something similar to this, anyone use put.io??? http://techie-buzz.com/internet-tools/put-io-fetches-content-from-almost-everywhere-and-brings-it-together.html Put.io Fetches Content From Almost Everywhere And Brings It Together
If I'm listening to music all the time, should I be worried about this creating a huge jump in my data usage? Does streaming use less data than downloading an mp3?
i assume you mean over a mobile network? if so, and assuming there's no transcribing going on, it's the same number of bits per track.
