Amazon puts up CD rack in the cloud, unearths your OLD stuff too Amazon's cloudy music service is filling up with every CD you ever bought, ready to play back on as many as 10 approved devices along with your MP3 collection. The service is called "AutoRip" and is US-only for the moment, but where available it creates digital versions of CDs in the cloud so as soon as the purchase is made …
As far as I know, I have a "UK" amazon account, but I was informed this morning that some tracks had been added into my cloud player by AutoRip or whatever it's called. It was an album by Livingston Taylor. I bought the album (on CD) around 5 years ago. Maybe I bought it from Amazon.com but it's unlikely.
So I'm very confused by this "only in USA" thing... I have 397 tracks in my Amazon cloud player, all added by Amazon as a result of my album purchases since around 1998/1999 to the present day.
In my personal collection, I have some 50GB of music, the vast majority from my personal CD collection, all loving ripped, and correctly tagged/indexed by yours truly over the years. For $24.99 a year, it's quite tempting to pay the fee and upload the entire lot to Amazon and let them worry about maintaining it, because, quite frankly, it's always been a pain in the rear to copy it and back it up. And the though of losing it all and having to start again doesn't bear thinking about.
I recently saw the benefit of the cloud player when I retired my HTC desire and started with my Samsung S3 - I installed the Amazon cloud player and there were all my albums, no space taken up on my phone, and no copying of files between phones/SD card malarky.
$25 buck a year seems a reasonable price. What the chances that it will be £25 *pounds* in the UK :-(
Jessops, Comet, Plays For Sure, Apricot / ACT, Nixdorf, DEC, Compaq, Wang, Polariod, Kodak, Prestel, Ceefax, Geocites ...
Will Amazon be around in 5, 10, 20 years?
Will they ever accidentally lose stuff?
Will they change the Business Model?
What if you forget or can't pay on time?
What if you lose your Internet connection?
Sorry, but cloudy services (= Shared Server + Client, as old as Timeshared Servers and online Access) are no substitute for having your own copies. Can sometimes be an complement. I have loads of websites. Do I trust the "Cloud" / Hosting? Even they recommend backups. I have running copies of it all in the attic., with a backup too.
I put about 10,000 tracks on both Amazon and Google about a year ago (I have a lot of CDs and a robotic ripper...), but have since given up on both of them.
They work OK when they do, but too often they ignore the perfectly good metadata and cover art and misidentify what I've uploaded as something entirely different. Believe me, you don't want to be listening to a playlist at the office and having the cover art for "101 Strings Plays Your Favorite Porn Themes" pop up on the screen. And I have no idea what either service would do with digitized copies of vinyl or tapes.
As for AutoRip, that's very nice when I buy something on Amazon. In the US. From Amazon. It doesn't appear to work for Amazon Marketplace purchases. Forget about amazon.somewhere-else. But when it works, it's nice to be able to listen immediately.
It's was easier for me to set up a Subsonic server, "uploads" take close to zero time, I can rip to FLAC and it transcodes to MP3 on the fly, I can only blame myself for bad metadata, and I get to choose what's available to listen to and not Amazon, Google, Apple, or some other company that basically doesn't have my musical interests at heart.
The Register 
Biting the hand that feeds IT
Copyright. All rights reserved © 1998–2024
