Amazon Cloud Player Surprise Apple and Android - Amazon beat Apple and Google by launching a new cloud-based music service, Cloud Player. This service lets users store their music collection by online and access them via various devices.
The launch of this Amazon’s service was quite shocking the public. The reason, many people think Apple or Google was the one who will introduce a service of music cloud for the first time.
The giant retail stores from the United States had announced the presence of Cloud Player, Tuesday (29/03/2011) local time. With this service users can upload their music collections and thousands of other songs that are purchased through various online stores, including Apple's iTunes. Users can listen their music collection through the Cloud Player on Android phones and computers.
"Our customers have said that they do not want to download music via their working computer or mobile phone as it would be difficult to move the music collection into other devices," said Bill Carr as vice president for music and movies on Amazon.
"Now (with Cloud Player), whether they are in office, home or on the way, customers can buy music from Amazon MP3, store them in the clouds and play it anywhere," added Carr.
Cloud Player services can be enjoyed free of charge by customers who already have an account on Amazon. But this time Cloud Player just available for Amazon customers in the United States (U.S.).
Amazon's account owner can use Cloud Drive to store their digital music library with a capacity of 5GB, or equivalent with storage capacity of 1,000 songs. While customers who buy the album from Amazon MP3 will get an upgrade until it reaches the capacity of 20GB.
This service is also apparently not confined to DRM, aka regulation of digital copyright. So, anyone can upload music files without being disturbed verification steps. After that, users can create playlist, manage content, and downloading music and uploading them to their collection.
Meanwhile, Apple seemed will launch cloud versions of iTunes in the coming months. Google also was reportedly were preparing a cloud-based music service and will release it this year.
Here’s how Amazon Cloud Player works (more detail):
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.
You get 5GB of free storage, which amounts to about 1,200 songs, or 20 GB with the purchase of one MP3 album (typically $9.99) through the end of 2011. Additional storage is available at a dollar per gigabyte per year, so 50 GB is $50 per year, and so on.
Each song take 5 to 10 seconds to upload, so I’d recommend letting the Amazon MP3 Uploader run overnight if you have a large collection.
Then you’re ready to start enjoying your music. You can listen from any computer or Android device running the Amazon MP3 app that has an Internet connection. Better yet, you can then download your music to any computer or Android device for playback offline. Just select download device when you start playing music and it downloads in the background — easy.
Amazon is giving Apple a run for its money with the new Amazon Appstore, Cloud Drive and Cloud Player. Plus Android now competes head to head in all of Apple’s hardware categories — phones, tablets, and soon music players, with the introduction of Samsung’s 4- and 5-inch Galaxy Players. It's enough to make even iPhone users, like me, take another look at Android.
