The Amazon MP3 Cloud Player Rocks!

Hey you gadget geeks out there, a cool new service by my favorite music download site, Amazon Mp3, is now available. Not only does Amazon offer some of the best prices for downloaded music anywhere, it now hosts a way for Amazon users to upload any currently-owned music (downloaded from anywhere or ripped from your CD collection) to be accessed in a customer's virtual "Cloud Drive." It's called Amazon Cloud Player for Android and Web. 5 GB of space is given initially for free. As a promotion, Amazon is offering a deal where if you by any one of 23 preselected albums for $3.99 or under, they will automatically give you 20 GB of "cloud" space, free, for a year (at which point the regular pricing takes over).

I purchased Cheryl Crow's 100 Miles From Memphis album to download from the 23, and then a new option appeared asking if I wanted the album to automatically upload to The Cloud. Heck yes! Even though my selection sailed heavenward, I still received a link on my desktop for a download of the album to my hard drive, as usual. I went to the Android Market on my phone, downloaded the Amazon Mp3 for Android app, signed into my Amazon account there, and Cheryl Crow's record was waiting, ready to play. Cool. I then went back to my Mac, downloaded the Amazon Mp3 Uploader. The app quickly searched my computer hard drive for music, found the all the songs available on the Mac, and created a list by song, artist and album, to choose from. I went through and selected my "desert island" songs that I supposed would fit the allotted 20 GB space. There is a very handy tool at the bottom left of the up-loader which helps keep track of the allotted GB budget. It showed that I went over my limit. That's when my "desert island" picks had to be narrowed even further! It took about 12 hours to upload 2,777 songs (approximately 18 GB, all ripped or downloaded at mostly 256 kbps). When the songs made it to The Cloud, the player on my Android had no trouble getting to whichever of the 2,777 songs I searched.

The grade I give for the Amazon Cloud Player for Web and Android is a solid "A"--and that's for ease of downloading all the software, setting it all up, the nominal learning curve, ease of uploading songs and playing them on the phone and from the web. We'll see what the storage plan pricing settles into within the next year as the "Cloud Drive" concept catches on to the masses.

I think that this Cloud Drive is the wave of the future for mobile music listeners. Hard drives and local memory on mp3 players will soon be a thing of the past. The cool thing is, there are several storage capacity options--$1 per GB, per year: $50 for 50, $100 for 100, and so on. Throwing down big bucks for storage capacity on a smart phone is no longer necessary with Android phones. The Amazon uploads are to a "real" hard drive in the sky and may serve as a secondary backup for an mp3 collection. Of course, I like to have my back-ups closer to earth, on a few of my own drives (it pays to be careful!).

I can play my music library from both the web and my phone without using up a single MB, except for the small footprint of the player application! I am finding more confirmation in the wisdom of purchasing an Android phone. I am a loyal Mac user, but since the Verizon ink is still wet on the Apple contract, I will wait to see what transpires with a possible 4G iPhone in my future. The Amazon MP3 Cloud Player rocks!

Take the opportunity now to snag the 20 GB free-for-a-year offer before it, too, disappears into the clouds!