I’ve been an Amazon.com customer since July, 1996, and have never gotten around to signing up for iTunes. For the past few months I’ve been playing with Amazon’s S3 cloud storage service. It works fine for streaming media for embedding audio and video on the site. Today, Amazon introduced a new, consumer-oriented, service called Cloud Drive. It includes an online MP3 Cloud Player.
Amazon says that MP3’s bought on the site don’t apply to the 5 GB free limit, so the first thing I did was buy an album (for only $5), and that automatically kicked up the first year’s free limit to 20 GB. And, indeed, the 75 megabytes used for the files didn’t register. It would have been nice if my previous purchases were included as free storage, but Jeff Bezos isn’t that generous.
I uploaded a bunch of MP3’s, and gave the player a try. Gizmodo said there are some “jitteries” in the sound, but so far playback has been perfectly smooth. The Cloud Player’s volume control works in Firefox, but not in Google Chrome. Haven’t tried IE 8 yet.
An upload application is needed if you want to grab an entire music collection and/or folders. Using the Cloud Drive web browser page, folders can be created and songs uploaded.
Downloading files from a Cloud Drive uses the same AMZ format seen in Amazon’s MP3 store, and it invokes the download app. I can’t say how much better/worse this is than iTunes, because I don’t use it.
My big complaint is that the only choices for the Cloud Player are a web browser or Android. To make this useful for me, Amazon needs to hook up with Logitech to put Cloud Drive on Squeezebox. Logitech doesn’t offer online storage, so this would be a perfect hook-up. The Roku player has Amazon Video on Demand, so I’d like to see the Cloud Player there.
Follow-up: restarting Chrome got the volume control working.
I’ll jump on some things and not others. Mostly it depends on whether I have to enter my credit card information. I’m getting to the point where if it’s not a service I already used, and if they don’t take PayPal, then forget it. I’d thought about MP3tunes, for the Roku player actually, but never went for it. I have Squeezebox server software running in the basement on an old PC, and it works well.
Logitech does partner with ‘MP3tunes Locker’ (http://www.mp3tunes.com) for the Squeezebox, which also offers an Android app for accessing your music from a phone. (storage rates are similar to Amazon’s) However, their app’s rating isn’t getting many good reviews in the Market. And Amazon’s new MP3 app with the Cloud Drive/Player capability is. I too have had a Squeezebox for a few years, and was wondering if we’d be able to link Amazon’s Cloud Drive with it. I’ve never tried the MP3tunes Locker app.