amazon cloud drive & player (in Off-topic)

all i have to say is wow! ; )

more details please, im imagining streaming online with a magical device?

I'm assuming new golf clubs...

Go to Amazon, it's front and center on the home page.

So I can store all of my pirated songs with Amazon, who has my financial info and knows who I really am? This seems like a bad idea.

couldnt you do that with Wimp? But free, just need to access the pc which has the files.

Every time you imply that a large corporation might not have your best interests at heart a Fox News talking head cries...

even pirates must place their trust in the clouds at times! ; )

No cloud for me. US market only by the looks of things.

Not entirely true, I can get Cloud storage if I log in via Amazon.com, but the cloud player won't work.

if you buy an album from their mp3 store, it will automatically upgrade you, for a trial year, to the 20gb plan. ; )

5 GB...so I could put just less than a tenth of my music in the cloud? Nah, nothing better than an iPod for portable music outside the home. In the home, DLNA and library sharing do the job nicely.

For other file storage it sounds OK, but it is just that -- pure storage. Fire up an XLS, and it tries to open locally. Other than pics and music, it is going to involve an up/down transfer, unlike Google that will at least try to view the file in the cloud (and let you change it there), too. Five GB is a nice free amount, though, assuming they come out with better clients for replicating data up there (i.e. like DropBox, ZumoDrive, Mozy, etc...) Then it would be a very nice backup option with more than twice as much free storage as those other services.

Given the massive disk farms Amazon already has running, I think they are making a killing on those data plan prices, and even if their music stores for "free" (I do like their MP3 downloads and use them when my eMusic subscription falls short), music in the cloud makes no sense to me. Does everyone only listen to music via laptops or other internet-enabled devices? When it comes to music, I still don't understand anything other than a dedicated device that can hold your whole library (e.g. iPod Classic).

Having your music in the cloud is 100% the way it's going to be in the near future. It doesn't make sense to have 10 million copies of an identical music file on 10 million computers and devices.

Obviously we have a little ways to go before ubiquitous fast and reliable wireless internet is here for everyone, but it's well on its way.

All that being said, if Amazon really wanted to drum up excitement, they'd immediately give me access to all the CDs I've purchased through their site via their cloud service. Of course they'll never do that, but it would be awesome.

Anybody tried the Android app? I finally found it by scanning the code on the PC player, but it won't download.

i got the android app playing. it works as good as slacker or pandora except it is your music.

sut, for one person i agree with you. i have been trying to figure out how to get my daughter, who will be starting college in the fall, copies of all our music and then sync my purchases and her purchases so that we then all have access to everything in the future as well.

the android app and streaming to other devices is just gravy! ; )

So why aren't all books on the internet (or going to be in the near future)? Doesn't make sense to have so many copies strewn about, by your logic.

Internet-required consolidation is not going to be a 100% solution in the near future for a very simple reason -- power consumption. My iPod Classic can go some insane amount of time on batter power. Tack on wireless capability to that and power consumption goes nuts. Local devices have their place, and always will.

That's not even getting into the economics of it. Even if all the music is in one spot, where are all the access tokens going to be stored? Or are you assuming all of this music will also be 100% free?

SUT!!!!!!!!!!!!

Sut you came back to us! :D

Is that legal? Both of you accessing the same music at the same time in two very different locations? I'm not trying to have a "SHOULD it be legal" discussion with you, but the reason it sounds so appealing to you is that, technically, I think you are breaking the law (or at least the Amazon terms of service) in doing that. If what you are doing is legal, you could share your Amazon credentials with thousands of people, and they would all get the music for free. I'm honestly not sure how far "fair use" should go in that case, and I am certain the record companies are going to push in the far, far opposite direction.

If you do think it is completely legal to share music that way, you could have already been using 2 GB of free ZumoDrive space and share MP3s that way. Amazon is nothing more special than that other than the fact they hard-wired a media player into their web page design (which is not at all hard to do, nor particularly original).

Ahhh... That's smells like the Sut I know :P

parents can carry full-time students on their insurance until a certain age. i am financially responsible for her. i have no idea if there has been a lawsuit over this particular instance but i find it silly to purchase a song for us here at home and another one for her there.

is it legal for her to sync her ipod when she visits home? apple let's me sync the five ipods we have now with no restriction on where they go geographically afterward so what is the difference there?

You mean the guy who believes in paying for things from which he derives use and/or joy? Yeah, not sure what other "Sut" you might have been confusing me with before I reiterated that POV.

Just sayin' I missed you buddy :)

Sharing music in different locations is the whole point of the Amazon cloud player.

That being said, I agree that a dedicated device is the best for battery life, sound quality, storage capacity and in some case size. But there are times when I don't want to tote around multiple devices and while this will kill the battery on my phone, it's a nice option. I have a big collection of music for my three year old, and I don't listen to most of it, so this frees up space on my players for trips to grandmas or other places.

it will not let you copy drm music to the cloud by the way.

here is that clarification from the amazon site.

DRM (Digital Rights Managed) files: DRM protects the number and types of locations that songs can be played from. Because of these restrictions the Amazon MP3 Uploader and Amazon Cloud Player do not support these file types.

All valid points now, but power consumption and battery life will continue to get better as well. Once "stream everything" becomes more commonplace, the market will demand better battery performance and the manufacturers will respond or be left behind.

I also think we are going to end up trending away from buying music and more towards a very cheap or even free subscription type model; see Pandora and Spotify (or even terrestrial radio to some extent).

The RIAA is continuing to bury their heads in the sand, and they don't want to admit that their nice run of selling physical media at insane markups has run its course. People are sick of the duality of "the music you buy is yours", but oh yeah "you are actually only buying a license" so you can't do with it whatever you want... but even though you're buying a "license" we won't let you have the mp3 of that scratched CD you own for free (or even a discount), etc.

Of course, because those are Apple's terms and conditions, and the number of connected devices is limited to five -- that's where Apple draws the line.

I have no idea where Amazon draws that line, I am simply pointing out that such a line should (and probably does) exist.

Whether or not you see the point to having to buy a second copy of a song is immaterial. If it were material, I could rip my CDs and then hand them all to someone else so they could have them. Because, hey, why not? Why should they have to buy a copy when I have these spare CDs lying around? This is more or less just a discussion on the philosophy of Fair Use.

At what point do you believe you and your daughter should STOP sharing, or is a family's music collection simply allowed to be X times bigger than a single person's, X being the number of members in the family (because if each family members buys N number of songs, the overall collection gets to be X*N)? Note: I absolutely share music with my wife -- I hand her my iPod when she goes on car trips so she can listen to the whole library. Of course, then I don't have the iPod for myself, but can still listen to stuff at home (again, because that falls under Fair Use, in my opinion). Where that should end is the question. What are your thoughts?

i have always drawn the line with financial responsibility. as long as i am the one who is financially responsible for her as defined by the law and the internal revenue service then i see her use of songs i buy as fair use.

where do you draw the line in regards to children?

and in regards to apple, it is five computers but i believe you can have unlimited ipod, iphones and ipads.

I agree with you. But at some point the options you are describing will put everything in the opposite direction, won't it -- everything being free? Then what happens? If everything is just "out there" why would anyone pay for anything?

As long as I can have Fair Use, I don't mind paying for it (well, price fixing, etc. aside -- I know the RIAA ain't playing fair). If I scratch a CD and download CD-quality files, I think that is fair. If a dog eats a tape containing songs I taped off the radio, and I then download CD-quality versions of those tracks, I think that's wrong.

I don't want subscription services. I want to buy music and use it fairly. That is the most flexible solution given the technological, economic, and legal climate right now. And even in the future where batteries are better, one thing will remain true. A music player will always use less power than a music player + connectivity. Could the gap between those two become so small as to become immaterial? Yes. However, I would put that in the medium to somewhat far-out future rather than the near, because energy has always been the hold-back for these issues, and will continue to be (especially for anything wireless-related).

dude, I always thought any Apple device counted against the slots, but that was a while back. Now with so many devices they probably had to relax things or run the risk of reducing sales on one front or another. Poor, poor Apple, such a quandary to be in. *smile*

I don't really draw lines along family relations. I am more of a Communist, I guess -- each putting forward what one can. If my wife and I were very rich and had very separate tastes, for example, I would probably have each of us do all our own buying. For our child, I would be more likely to simply give him/her an allowance and let them buy their own tracks.

Contrast that with coming right out of college, and I move in with someone. Would I rip all of our CDs into a consolidated library for convenience within the home? Yeah. If the person I was with then moved out, would I give them all the CDs and also keep the whole collection, even perhaps burning my own CDs for car use? No (at least not now, back then I might have *smile*).

For me, it is about weighing a combination of my financial well being, convenience, concurrent use, format, and number of people listening in order to decide whether I need to shove more money at something. Case in point, if I had been downloading podcasts of This American Life (an NPR radio show) since they started podcasting, I would Have had a lot of episodes for free and could keep them stored. I didn't though. What I did, instead, was stream all of the episodes through my two Macs at the time, recording them all. I now have all of them in digital format and burned to CD. What was the right thing to do in that case? I sent a check for $250 bucks directly to TAL as a charity donation, about what it would have cost to download all the 99-cent MP3 downloads. Because I missed out on the technology in time to be getting something for free, I paid a little bit for it later, because I felt it was worth it and because I had the money. I'll give more to TAL in the future, too, even though it is well within my rights to simply keep the MP3s as I download them now (at least I think it is, I suppose I better read the fine print there, too. *smile*)

Isn't everything _already_ "out there"? (=

Keep in mind that the vast majority of artists make little to no money on actual music sales (and never have); merchandising, licensing and touring tend to be be better income producers.

I would reason that a properly implemented system where you paid a low flat monthly rate for unlimited access (lets just say $5), and artists got paid a tiny amount per play of their music, most artists would instantly be making more money off of their recorded music than they currently are.

it is an issue that the powers that be haven't really ever addressed though, as far as i know. using my family as an example, some of our music tastes overlap, probably between 10 & 25% at the most. so should we just pay double for the songs on all of our playlists or triple if the wifey likes them as well?

should everyone in a household be forced to have their own itunes account?

i tend to worry much more about getting those who never pay a dime for music brought into the fold rather than telling paying customers that they are violating a very grey area called fair use. just my thoughts on it though.

dude, I agree. That's why my method on paying for things is not hard and fast, and I'm not advocating for any policy.

scrobot, I agree that artists make more money off tours, etc. I would rather distribution get more personal rather than more nebulous, interacting directly with the artist, and then naturally segueing into going to see that band in person and buying a t-shirt. I'm not sure where a subscription and per-play payment scheme fits in there, because I am not sure who would be running the servers or how there would be any competition there. As a socialist sort of deal (which I am not against), like a BBC sort of deal, I could see that working. In a purely capitalist society, I don't see how it could work, because it would just come down to the biggest server farm winning, because they could just keep reducing prices. That behemoth would become the Wal-Mart of music subscriptions, and all I can say to that sort of huge entity is, "no thanks."