Wednesday, March 30, 2011

Very Cool: Amazon's Cloud Drive and Cloud Player

I spent some time this evening playing around with Amazon.com's new Cloud Drive and Cloud Player service. Amazon is offering 5gb of free storage for your Music, Docs, Pictures and Video. If you purchase any music album from Amazon.com MP3, they'll upgrade that to 20gb for the next year. See the ads below for some $2.99 albums that qualify for the upgrade. 20gb gives me enough storage to upload all my music and stream or download it to any computer I have. This is a great solution for the Cr-48 where local storage is limited and the native music player is currently lacking. Right now, I'm uploading Music from my machine at about 1gb an hour so it's going to take most of the night to get my entire collection but once that's finished I'll be able to stream or download songs to my desktop at work, my Android phone or my Cr-48 and most importantly, keep everything organized between them without needing to copy/rip a CD multiple times. The web based music player isn't anything fancy but it a clean interface and it handle's what I need with playlists, search and plenty of sort options. I know there's been plenty of talk and rumour about Google Music and I'll certainly give it a shot when it's available but for now, Amazon's Cloud Player service is quite impressive!
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9 comments:

  1. DanielMarch 30, 2011 at 11:35 PM

    I have enjoyed the service myself and am glad to see Amazon adding some competition to the mix (even if my family and friends insist I'm a salaried Google employee).

    Some people may want to use caution if they have questionable (possibly pirated) songs, as I understand Amazon reserves full access to user libraries and is very open to opening up user accounts to the Polizei: http://blogs.computerworld.com/18056/amazon_cloud_drive

    On the whole, I'm stoked to see someone finally jump on this (particularly for the reasons you describe). Who knows, maybe with 1Gb internet connections forthcoming (KC, Kansas), cloud projects like this will really take off.

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  2. DanielMarch 30, 2011 at 11:55 PM

    Okay, as evidence that my family thinks I am secretly a salaried Google employee, I was just in a video chat with my mother, and she literally thought my family and I took a trip over seas, as part of a secret Google Chrome adventure.

    Come on, Google, I'd accept a modest stipend . . . I suppose having a Cr-48 is a comparable, fringe benefit.

    Thanks for indulging me.

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  3. JimMarch 31, 2011 at 8:26 AM

    I went to Amazon.com, clicked a genre in the MP3 Downloads section, selected Albums, and then sorted the results by price lowest to highest. There are LOTS of results starting at $.99. Are these cheap albums eligible for the 20GB upgrade offer? I can't find anywhere that specifies if there is a minimum album cost for the free one-year upgrade. All I could find was something that states, "any album purchase may be eligible for a 20GB free upgrade." It's the "may" that I'm concerned about.

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  4. Jay LeeMarch 31, 2011 at 8:29 AM

    @Jim: not sure but I did buy one of the $2.99 albums (Norah Jones) and immediately got an email from Amazon saying I qualified for the 20gb. Then when I got the Amazon Order email later in the evening, there was a 2.00 discount (no idea why, it didn't show up when I placed the order) so the album was actually only $0.99. Not sure if the $2.00 was due to it being my first Amazon.com MP3 order or what.

    Jay

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  5. AMarch 31, 2011 at 8:48 AM

    What Android phone do you use ... out of curiosity?

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  6. Jay LeeMarch 31, 2011 at 9:07 AM

    @John Doe: I've had a Motorola Droid, Droid 2 and Droid X in the past but I'm currently on the Thunderbolt. Verizon 4G LTE is incredibly fast but the battery life could use some tweaking.

    Jay

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  7. RajMarch 31, 2011 at 1:05 PM

    AudioGalaxy is also a nice solution for this scenario. It streams music from your desktop to anywhere (web browser, android, iOS) via a pretty nice interface. You get to act as your own cloud.

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  8. Ben MarvinMarch 31, 2011 at 11:32 PM

    @Jim Any album is eligible, you can even find ones as low as $0.69

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  9. UnknownApril 1, 2011 at 1:57 AM

    I'll have to try one of the .69 albums. Right now, I'm loading it down with all the free samplers and albums that Amazon has floating around. I love those things, so having them available like this instead of having to download all of them is pretty incredible.

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