Amazon's Cloud music player

[ElTaco]

Ok so this is technically not on topic and may be more inline with the Tech forum but since most people now use some sort of digital devices to listen to their music, have you tried it or started using Amazon's Cloud player? I loaded it on my phone and uploaded a few gigs of my music and it works relatively well. I've also purchased a few tracks through amazon, which were immediately placed on my cloud drive and available to play or even download to my phone.

[Goober McTuber]

I still listen to music on my stereo system in the basement. You kids and your crazy toys.

[King Crimson]

i've heard good things about it....and they beat iTUnes to the punch, which i like. nothing has ruined digital music like iTunes (which sucks, in case you didn't know).

i'm not a PC/Mac warrior by any means, but i've been P2P for almost 15 years now....and the iTunes model has made everything shite. plus, they don't have most of the good music and the compression rates suck...despite their standing claim to be "hip" or edgy.

[BSmack]

I checked out their FAQs. Still not offering lossless music. Starting off with 5GB of storage space. How quaint. I have more than that on my phone.

[Screw_Michigan]

Your ears can actually tell the difference, B?

[ElTaco]

I checked out their FAQs. Still not offering lossless music. Starting off with 5GB of storage space. How quaint. I have more than that on my phone.

It will be interesting to see how Google and Apple respond. There are a few things to remember on amazon though. If you buy 1 Full CD a year, they bump the 5Gigs to 20Gigs. The other is that any music you do buy from amazon doesn't count torward your 5/20Gig limit and last is that you can purchase 1Gig/1$/year I think, which is ok, although there are better deals out there. Of course, Amazon is one of the biggest cloud service/storage providers so I guess if you want the best, you may need to consider paying a bit more.

On the other hand, Google also sells storage through Google Apps/mail/pictures/etc... You start with a few gigs, but can upgrade yourself with an additional 20 gigs for fairly cheap ($5). There is not a Google Music player yet, but hopefully whatever 'cloud music service' google puts out, will tie in to their current service easily. You can already store any type of file in your google storage and I believe there are video players that can play video from your google storage, so again I'll say that I assume that their streaming solution will plug into their current Google Apps/Drive stuff.

As far as iTunes goes, rolling out a drive/streaming is a decent undertaking but there are lots of solutions out there, however, I will say this. Apple up till now has not even competed in any of the Cloud services and while they may roll out something that will do Music streaming, to be truthful, I don't think it will compete directly with all the features of Amazon and Google.

To be honest, I think Google could blow Apple (Ios/iTunes, which does blow) out of the water if they would finally bring their Google Apps to Android in some form, along with the cloud storage, video and music solutions they will hopefully roll out soon. Already, they are beating apple in cloud solutions so it is a bit confusing why they don't foll out a big better integration with PCs and Phones to allow them to essentially fight MS Office, backups, etc.. I mean the average person could pay $50 a year to get 200 Gigs of storage and than use that to do backups, music, documents, etc... in the Cloud. Just make sure you back it up to some local drives as well in case Google accidentally kills your account. hey, Shit happens, Deal with it and CYA (Cover your ass) with online and offline backups. Duh...

[BSmack]

Your ears can actually tell the difference, B?

Even on my shitty Bose desktop speakers I can tell the difference between lossless and lossy compression. Lossy compression absolutely rapes the high end of the spectrum, making high hats and crash cymbals in particular sound like shite.

[ElTaco]

I have heard of some rumblings that Apple and some other sellers want to upgrade their stuff to less compressed/better audio/higher bit rate, but of course its all about what kind of deals they can make with the studios. No doubt it will mean higher costs for the end user. I don't think anyone sells lossless audio so for people who can really tell the difference and it bothers them are stuck with buying CDs. I'm sure there are some online places to download from, but back in the day when mp3s were new, I could only find really shitty recordings on common pirate sites. To be fair, this isn't all that different from movie and TV. Even the HD service you get from Netflix, cable companies and itunes tends to be 720p and not 1080p. To get the 1080p stuff you still have to go out and rent/buy the movie on blue ray. The one thing that irritates me is that watching a movie is very different from listening to music.

I can't really hear the difference, but I have shitty hearing. I used to be able to tell crappy recordings from good recordings but mostly because crappy recordings were done with crappy equipment/software so the recording itself was less then clear. Honestly, because of bandwidth limitations, I don't think any service will stream uncompressed music and as bandwidth/data caps are introduced, I do not think you'll want to stream uncompressed music. Netflix already had to introduce new compression measures in Canada to deal with the idiotic caps that the country is putting in place there for the average customer.

[BSmack]

Honestly, because of bandwidth limitations, I don't think any service will stream uncompressed music and as bandwidth/data caps are introduced, I do not think you'll want to stream uncompressed music. Netflix already had to introduce new compression measures in Canada to deal with the idiotic caps that the country is putting in place there for the average customer.

That's why I have little to no interest in cloud storage for my music. I have 1.5 TB of music. Just my Led Zeppelin collection would be 10x the space Amazon is offering. I'll stick to redundant drives and backup drives for now.