The Amazon Cloud Player

I’ve been finding a lot of pretty good music on Youtube lately. I’ll share what I’ve discovered in later posts – what I wanted to talk about today is the somewhat new Amazon Cloud Player.

When I find good music, I like to look around Amazon to see what other people think of it. Not for any sort of validation, but to read their comments and interpretation. Generally, the music I listen to is enjoyed by a more adult crowd and that type of crowd understands how to piece things out in such a way that’s easily read. Some of the best descriptions have come from Amazon comments and Youtube comments.

As I was reading yesterday, I decided to log into my account to see if there was a way to buy music from Amazon and then save it to my account for playing on multiple devices. I know Apple and Google do this, but I wasn’t sure about Amazon. And to be honest with you, I’m sort of out of the loop when it comes to this type of thing.

After I was logged in, I noticed something called the Amazon Cloud Player, so I clicked on its link. Right after I did that, a window popped up that told me I had certain albums that I had recently purchased that were “auto ripped.” Basically, if you purchase a CD from Amazon, that has the auto rip feature, they’ll not only send you the CD, but they’ll also throw the MP3 files in your cloud player (or more accurately, just make links to their music library). I had no idea this was going to happen and was pleasantly surprised when I discovered that I had seven albums waiting for me.

Right after I found the albums in my player, I went ahead and downloaded the Amazon MP3 app from Google Play on my phone. Works wonderfully.

This is pretty awesome for a few reasons. First, I’m getting kind of tired of buying CDs, only to rip them and store the audio files on a hard drive. I can’t make playlists (I’m not about to do that on Windows) and I can’t (or don’t want to) adjust things certain ways. I’m also tired of connecting my phone to my computer to upload and delete music that I’ve saved on the hard drive I just mentioned.

Second, I like simplicity. This kind of goes along with the whole “file” thing I just talked about – I like the fact that I can buy something and have it stored in Amazon’s cloud. I’m not sure I’m 100% down with the whole cloud thing yet, but it certainly seems like the way the world is leaning. I don’t think I want to be the only guy left in the used tape store, looking through the old cassettes. And if this cloud player is anything like Kindle and Audible.com, where I can store and arrange what I like to read and listen to, then I’m in.

Lastly – and this kind of has to do with the previous two reasons – I like to have my whole music library on my phone. Right now, I can only store part of what I own. If I upload my music to the cloud, I get to have everything all in one place. Then, I can listen to what I want, when I want. And it would be really nice to actually name the songs from my older CDs. I have tons of albums with songs listed as “Track 1” and “Track 2” right now. I could spend a few minutes to give those files proper names and then upload them. Just an idea.

Overall, I’m pretty excited about getting involved with this new feature from Amazon. And while it was probably introduced ten years ago and had been through seven iterations already, it’s exciting nonetheless.

Introducing Amazon Cloud Player