My granddaughter’s hard drive had to be replaced. When she opened up iTunes on the new hard drive, she was dismayed to discover that her music wasn’t already there. I remember saying to her, “Your music isn’t in the cloud. It’s only on your hard drive.”
Things are changing. The grandkid’s music can be in the cloud now.
Amazon announced Amazon Cloud Drive and Amazon Cloud Player today. Cloud Drive is described as “your personal disk drive in the sky.” They are offering 5 GB of online storage free. You can store anything, including files uploaded from your computer, and access it from any computer.
Cloud Player will play music you have stored on your Cloud Drive. It can be listened to from any computer or with a free Android phone app.
If you make a new MP3 purchase from Amazon right now, they’ll increase your Cloud Drive storage to 20 GB free for one year. (It’s hard to find the price for the storage upgrade without actually signing up for it. If you know what it is, would you let me know?) More importantly, any MP3 purchase you make from Amazon is stored free and doesn’t count against your storage quota.
Amazon jumped into the music in the cloud arena first, but Google and Apple are both working on a similar product. They are going to have to come up with some sweet deals to top 20GB of free storage plus free storage of any purchases.
Suzanne Kantra at Techlicious commented in Amazon Cloud Drive & Cloud Player Streaming Music Service that
Until now, I’ve been pretty impressed with the way Apple’s iTunes lets me keep my music synced between my iPhone, iPod Touch, iPad and a few computers. Today, with the introduction of Amazon’s Cloud Player streaming music service and Cloud Drive file storage service, iTunes seems a little antiquated.
Instead of plugging all your devices into one computer to keep them synced, which iTunes requires, Amazon Cloud Player, in conjunction with Cloud Drive, keeps your music stored on its servers, so it’s available to any computer or Android device that has an Internet connection.
iTunes may not feel antiquated for long. We’ll have to see what Apple comes up with to compete in this market.
Suzanne at Techlicious explains how it works.
Here’s how it works. First you download and install the Amazon MP3 Uploader program. It scours your computer for all of your music—including music you’ve purchased through iTunes—and lets you choose what you’d like to store in your Cloud Drive. You can choose by playlist or individual songs and all files are stored at their original bit rate. If you go to Cloud Drive directly, you’ll see folders for documents, music, pictures and videos, so you can use Cloud Drive as your online backup service. It also means video is next on Amazon’s list for its Cloud Player.
Free backup space for all your music, including music from iTunes. Good heavens, what’s not to like?
What do you think? Are you going to give it a try?
[Ed.: This post appeared on BlogHer in a slightly different form.]
