You might remember the saga from earlier this month. Three weeks ago we found that if you make a few changes to your rooted Android, you could sync your music with the cloud. A few days later I chronicled my experienced with the Honeycomb cloud music player. I know some people have found success with it, but for me it was an utter failure. It’ll come eventually, so I’m not too upset. Making me less upset is Amazon’s recent announcement of its own cloud storage and streaming service. They’ve made it quite easy, and I’m jumping on board as I type.
I caught this on Engadget, but all the information is in the press release that Amazon circulated. Here are the important numbers. Everyone gets 5GB of free storage, but there are plenty of plans beyond that. The best way to increase your storage is to buy an MP3 album from Amazon.com. That gets you 20GB of storage for a year, which normally costs $20. Additionally, music purchased from the Amazon store doesn’t count against your quota. This is quite brilliant, as it incentivizes people to purchase from Amazon. It also disincentivizes people to buy DRM music from the iTunes store, since that can’t be uploaded to the cloud.
Here are all of Amazon’s storage plans:
To use the service from your Android you’ll have to run through a number of steps. First, go to Amazon.com and set up your cloud account. It’s just a few clicks to sign in and accept the terms and conditions. From there you can upload music from your hard drive, as long as it is not DRM-protected.
Then you’ll have to set it up on your mobile device. You might have to download the latest version of the Amazon MP3 store — I wouldn’t know, because I had apparently deleted it from my Android previously. Here’s the hitch: in order to activate it on your Android device you have to 1) agree to the T&C on your computer first, and 2) download something from the Amazon MP3 store. Thankfully, you can just download the free song of the day and activate for free. This involves signing in and accepting the T&C a couple of times. Once you do that you’ll see the music you uploaded from your computer. You can then stream it.
Your music is uploaded at the original bitrate, which, I suppose, can be good and bad. I do in some ways appreciate cloud services that condense uploads, since that makes for clearer streaming. I might suggest that if you have a lot of 320 bitrate music on your computer that you make copies at a lower bitrate, for both upload speed and playback reasons. (Though, I have to say, when I’m on full 3G signal or WiFi, having the high bitrate cloud streams is pretty sweet.)
To me, the only thing that Amazon can do now to improve is offer a subscription service. With that, plus cloud storage, they can easily dominate the Android music scene. The Amazon MP3 store was already included on Android as an iTunes replacement. Now it’s that and more. Good on Amazon for jumping on this opportunity to provide Android users with all the music they want.
