Web Design News | Amazon’s New ‘Cloud Drive’: Your Music, Everywhere You Go

Step 1

Enter your contact information.

Step 2

Enter your project information.

Step 3

Choose the PHP programmers you want to hire.

Compare Free PHP Quotes

Amazon’s New ‘Cloud Drive’: Your Music, Everywhere You Go

Attention PHP Programmers - Add A Free Listing! Get more clients.

Apple and Google are both rumored to be working on music streaming services, but the first real competitor to enter the streaming music battle is Amazon.com.

The company has announced Amazon Cloud Drive, a web-based backup service where you can store your documents, photos music and other files. To go along with Cloud Drive, Amazon is offering Cloud Player, which can stream your music library to any web browser or Android mobile device. Cloud Player also allows you to download files and create playlists through its web-based interface. Note, however, that Amazon is using Flash Player to upload and stream music which means it won’t work on Apple’s iOS devices.

Amazon is offering 5GB of Cloud Drive storage for free to anyone with an Amazon account. That number can be bumped to 20GB with the purchase of an Amazon MP3 album. Additional storage works out to $1 per GB, with plans at 20GB, 50GB, 100GB, 200GB and 1000GB.

At the high end 1000GB will set you back $1000 per year, which is enough to buy roughly 10 TB worth of external hard drives every year. Of course your external hard drives don’t live in the cloud and won’t let you listen to music wherever you are, but if it’s just backups you want, clearly there are cheaper alternatives.

The real appeal of Cloud Drive only comes into play when it’s used with Cloud Player. Bring the two together and you can stream your music library to any web browser or Android mobile device.

While an online music locker capable of sending your music to any device feels almost inevitable at this point, Amazon’s offering is, thus far, disappointing. The interface is awkward and looks a bit like Hotmail did when it first launched — primitive. For example, using the web interface, there’s no way to download more than one file at a time.

Any music you already own must be manually uploaded, there is no automatic syncing like you’ll find in file backup services like Dropbox. The Amazon MP3 Uploader can scan your iTunes library and makes uploading a bit smoother, but if you’ve got a sizable music collection — several hundred gigabytes of music — you’re looking at days, if not weeks, to upload everything to Cloud Drive.

Cloud Drive is much better if you’re buying all your music from the Amazon MP3 Store, and clearly this is what Amazon would like you to do. To encourage that, songs purchased from the Amazon MP3 store and saved directly to your Amazon Cloud Drive never count toward your storage limit and are free to store forever. Couple that with rumors of Amazon working on an Android device and it isn’t hard to see how Cloud Drive, though basic at the moment, might one day become a serious iTunes competitor.

But there are possible legal problems Cloud Drive may have to overcome. The record industry still believes that you should buy a new copy of every song for every device you own, and Amazon has no way to determine whether you actually purchased your existing music files. MP3tunes, which also offers to store and stream your music library, was sued by music labels. Amazon, however, doesn’t believe licensing will be a problem. “We don’t need a license to store music,” Craig Pape, director of music at Amazon, tells the New York Times. “The functionality is the same as an external hard drive.”

Amazon may be first to the market among its sizable competitors like Apple and Google, but Cloud Drive in its current form isn’t particularly innovative, nor does it offer many of the features long-standing competitors like Dropbox or MP3Tunes already have. Still, Amazon’s Cloud Drive already has Google and Apple beat on one count — it exist.

See Also:

Source http://www.webmonkey.com/?p=50389
Tue, 29 Mar 2011 15:15:59 GMT
Tags: Amazon, Multimedia, Web Services,

Attention PHP Programmers - Add A Free Listing! Get more clients.

Amazon

Lessons From a Cloud Failure: It’s Not Amazon, It’s You

Amazon’s cloud-hosted Web Services experienced a catastrophic failure last week, knocking hundreds of sites off the web. Some developers saw the AWS outage as a warning about what happens when we rely too much on the cloud. But the real failure of A

Amazon Autopsy Reveals Causes of Cloud Death

Amazon has apologized to customers affected by last week’s EC2 outage and offered a detailed post mortem about exactly what went wrong. The short answer is that a network update shifted traffic to the wrong router, which then wrecked havoc on Amazon

Multimedia

MPEG LA Starts the Search for VP8 patents

MPEG LA, the one-stop shop for motion video patent licenses, yesterday announced a call for patents essential to the VP8 video compression algorithm — the algorithm that is fundamental to Google’s WebM video format. MPEG LA is asking organizat

YouTube Begins Serving Up Native WebM Video

YouTube has announced it will begin offering HTML5 videos in the WebM codec to web browsers that support it. So far YouTube says that it has encoded 30 percent of its videos in WebM, which accounts for 99 percent of all traffic to the site. YouTube’

Web Services

Amazon S3 Storage Now Handles Entire Websites

Cheap, cloud-hosted web servers are a key component of a distributed web. But sometimes you don’t need a server, you just need a cheap way to host your static files, like images and videos. That’s the gap Amazon’s S3 service has long fil

Google Taps Your Friends to Improve Search Results

Google has updated its Social Search tool to add links, photos and relevant web pages from your friends to Google’s normal search results. The changes build on Google’s earlier social-search efforts and help add a more familiar, human element

Thousand of APIs Paint a Bright Future for the Web

Once a novel idea that seemed limited to Flickr, the web-based API is now everywhere you turn — Twitter, Foursquare, Google Maps and thousands of other sites offer up their data in the form of an API. APIs mean that third-party developers can build

Members:

Marina Del Rey

Perlman Creative Group

Perlman Creative Group is a Los Angeles based, full service graphic design firm specializing in marketing communication, brand development, logos, packaging, corporate identity and website design.

Marina Del Rey, California US

Navi Mumbai

I-Soft Solutions

We at I-Soft Solutions provide other web services which include Customized Static Web Design, Dynamic Web Development in PHP Mysql, Web Hosting, Domain Name Registrations, Website Maintains Etc.

Navi Mumbai, Maharashtra IN

Chelsea

Ann Arbor Software

Chelsea, Michigan US

Petaluma

Skytec Hosting

Skytec Web Hosting is California based internet services company that specializes in web hosting solutions for corporate companies, small business enterprises, webmasters and individuals.

Petaluma, California US

Gilbert

Freddythunder

Gilbert, Arizona US