Category: Tech

Amazon Cloud Drive and Player

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.

NoTube

YouTube is having a serious problem, but I can’t find anybody talking about it. Videos definitely aren’t streaming on my site, or on others, but they’re working on some. Weird.

Follow-up: OK, it’s half an hour later and YouTube is working again. Now I can post what I wanted.

Atlas Shrugged

Japan moved about 8 feet, and the Earth’s axis has been tilted by about 6.5 inches, changing the speed of the planet’s rotation and shortening the day by 1.8 millionths of a second. But as horrible as this earthquake is, even upgraded to magnitude 9.0 it’s only the fourth most powerful in my lifetime.

We’ve been planning to buy a new Honda CRV sometime before September. Our ’02 CRV was made in Japan, and not to be petty in my concern about the earthquake, I was nevertheless worried that it would affect the supply. But according to Honda, CRV production is now done mostly in the U.S.

Safe room

I’m running 64-bit Windows 7 SP1 — the latest and greatest desktop/laptop OS from Microsoft. All security updates are in place, and I use Microsoft Security Essentials. Yesterday I was reading a Google blog and, as I sometimes do for fun, I was giving the “Next Blog” link a few spins. And what happened? I landed on a page that made McAfee Site Advisor go crazy with warnings. Firefox was obviously being redirected to a bad place and then, before I could do anything, Security Essentials chimed in with warnings. I killed Firefox, then immediately rolled the system back to the last restore point. After restarting Windows I ran a scan and it came up clean.

This is where I get off the train. I’m giving up on Windows ever being secure, and I have no confidence that sticking with legitimate sites offers any assurance of safety (yes, I know Google can’t police every blog it hosts). So I’m typing this using Firefox, on Ubuntu Linux 10.10, that’s running inside of a VMware Player virtual machine. If anything bad happens in my comfort zone here, I’ll blow away the virtual machine and create new one from the Ubuntu ISO file.

By the way, I registered my little site with McAfee, and to the extent that WordPress and the plugins I use are safe, and if Bluehost isn’t harboring anything bad, the site is clean, and you won’t find any ads here either, of course.

Follow-up: And now I’m running Jolicloud, a custom version of Linux 2.6 in another virtual machine. Cool beans, to borrow an expression used by a friend of mine.

New York’s finest

Sir Tim Rice is getting closer to Massachusetts in his American Pie series on BBC Radio 2. This week he’s on New York, and after rattling off a long list of great American songwriters, who does he open with? The Ramones!

[audio:http://s3.amazonaws.com/dogratcom/Audio/2011/Feb/TimRiceAmericanPieNY.mp3|titles=Tim Rice’s American Pie: New York]

Tech note: I recorded that audio clip using Wavosaur, set up to monitor the Realtek High Definition Audio Stereo Mix device. As with using Windows Live Movie Maker to capture video, there’s a lot of misinformation about the Realtek stereo mixer, which doesn’t appear by default in Windows 7. There was even some speculation that it’s gone because Realtek was concerned about Digital Rights Management. Without the mixer you can’t record audio while it’s playing on the sound card but, no, there’s no conspiracy. The mix device does appear in Windows 7, if you know the trick.