Amazon Cloud Player Upgraded with Scan and Match, 256 Kbps Audio

milo · Aug 6, 2012

ScottYelich said:
Who says I have to scan my *entire* library? To put it another way, just because you think one must scan an entire library, that doesn't necessarily mean that's the way it is, ya know?

That's just how it works. The software scans your entire library, the only way to avoid that is by hacking it to hide some of your music. Sure, it's possible to test on a few songs but saying that without explanation makes it sound like you either don't understand how the service works, or you didn't really test it out.

pmz said:
Those are not facts at all, they are distortions of reality.

Nope, he's right, those are facts. Amazon IS cheaper in many cases (and using a different codec doesn't change that). And while it's pretty lame and inexplicable for devices to not support AAC (without DRM) at this point, it is a fact that those devices exist.

pmz said:
Today it matches over 12,000 tracks (a.k.a. Everything possible).

Sorry, I don't believe you. I don't know if you're mistaken or lying, but there's no way that every last thing available on the iTunes store is matched.

imthenachoman · Aug 7, 2012

Has anyone figured out what Amazon's service does with ID3 tags, album cover art, and explicit content?

More specifically:

do they use your ID3 tags or do they replace them with what they have?
do they use your album cover art or theirs?
will it match explicit content with explicit content or replace it like iMS does?

D-Dave · Aug 7, 2012

Chupa Chupa said:
Well with that rationalization Microsoft peripherals and other hardware accessories should be free too.

Well, I guess you are smart enough to get what I was talking about, but for the sake of it: When I was talking about Hardware I was using the term as a synonym for PCs, not peripherals or other accessories.

Would have made no sense, as both companies produce the later, but only apple sells PCs.

Chupa Chupa · Aug 7, 2012

D-Dave said:
Well, I guess you are smart enough to get what I was talking about, but for the sake of it: When I was talking about Hardware I was using the term as a synonym for PCs, not peripherals or other accessories.

Would have made no sense, as both companies produce the later, but only apple sells PCs.

Well, if you want to go that route, Windows 8 will run on the new Surface table. I don't see Windows giving the tablet away.

My point is just because a company makes the bulk of its profits in one category should not preclude them from recouping development costs of other products. I don't see Microsoft selling any of its products at or near cost like Apple is selling 10.8. So when people grouse that 10.8 is a whole sawbuck it's really rather empty and argumentative.

D.T. · Aug 7, 2012

For the heck of it, I tried a few albums that had so-so success on iTM on Amazon Match. I haven't purchased the extended service, but I get 250 songs, so I figured I could even upload, match, and then delete them to free up the space

Anyway, they were about the same. No major improvements, but not any major changes either. I think the matching logic isn't much different.

I have purchased quite a bit of new recently from Amazon (some incredible deals for $1.99-$2.99), and the download system is pretty nice, basically you download a directive file that runs in a local app and fetches all the songs and autoloads them into iTunes (which then upload them to iTM).

It's a big circular cloud-o-rama!

talmy · Aug 7, 2012

D.T. said:
For the heck of it, I tried a few albums that had so-so success on iTM on Amazon Match. I haven't purchased the extended service, but I get 250 songs, so I figured I could even upload, match, and then delete them to free up the space

After signing up to iTunes Match I decided to do just this (250 songs at a time) to Amazon on the ones iTunes couldn't match. So far, Amazon isn't doing better than iTunes. I'm just using the services to freshen old lower bit rate tracks and (somewhat successfully) convert captured phonograph records to digital. I've got no interest in storing this stuff in "the cloud".

noisycats · Aug 7, 2012

talmy said:
After signing up to iTunes Match I decided to do just this (250 songs at a time) to Amazon on the ones iTunes couldn't match. So far, Amazon isn't doing better than iTunes. I'm just using the services to freshen old lower bit rate tracks and (somewhat successfully) convert captured phonograph records to digital. I've got no interest in storing this stuff in "the cloud".

I'm trying exactly the same thing: loaded 250 un"match"ed iTunes songs to Amazon. But I can't see where Amazon has attempted to match? What is the secret?

talmy · Aug 7, 2012

noisycats said:
I'm trying exactly the same thing: loaded 250 un"match"ed iTunes songs to Amazon. But I can't see where Amazon has attempted to match? What is the secret?

It's a flaw in their design. You need to download the songs and see if they've become 256k.

noisycats · Aug 7, 2012

talmy said:
It's a flaw in their design. You need to download the songs and see if they've become 256k.

Ha! Very nice. Thanks.

nibus · Aug 7, 2012

imthenachoman said:
Has anyone figured out what Amazon's service does with ID3 tags, album cover art, and explicit content?

More specifically:

do they use your ID3 tags or do they replace them with what they have?

do they use your album cover art or theirs?

will it match explicit content with explicit content or replace it like iMS does?

See my previous post - https://forums.macrumors.com/posts/15385572/

However I didn't test explicit content so I can't say how Amazon matches it.

malnar · Aug 8, 2012

imthenachoman said:
Has anyone figured out what Amazon's service does with ID3 tags, album cover art, and explicit content?

More specifically:

do they use your ID3 tags or do they replace them with what they have?

do they use your album cover art or theirs?

will it match explicit content with explicit content or replace it like iMS does?

Amazon definitely uses your own ID3 tags, as I have very specific changes I make to every one of my albums (artist listed last name first, album title listed with year in parenthesis (ex: (2012) Album Title). Everything I upload is exactly as I expect it to be in that regard.

I'm unsure about album art. I'm pretty sure they use your own art and substitute when there is nothing provided by you (I've found a couple of funny results this way). One album I have was signed by the artist and there was no good artwork available when I got it, so I scanned that, and that is indeed the artwork that shows in the songs on Cloud Player.

I've barely gotten it to match anything (440 out of 38,000 songs) so I really can't say. I'm fine with that, though. Most of my music is 256/320, so matching is the one feature I really don't care about - it's why I'm using Amazon and not iTunes Match. IM matched far too many things incorrectly and offered no way to correct those mistakes, so they've lost my business unless Apple changes something in the next iOS and iTunes updates. Mismatches in Cloud Player are easy to take care of - click the arrow to the right of a song and "fix mismatch" or "remove". What I'm annoyed about is NEITHER iTunes Match nor Cloud Player have matched and upgraded the small bunch of low-quality files that I have. But overall, Cloud Player kicks iTunes Match's butt, and unless there's a massive overhaul of IM, I can't see how that's going to change much this year.

malnar · Aug 8, 2012

ArtOfWarfare said:
... A quarter-million songs. Assuming the average song length is 4 minutes, that's a million minutes worth of music. That's just shy of 700 days of continuous music... it's just shy of 23 months long.

...

Do you realize how insane that amount is?

Is it insane for average people who don't collect music? Sure. Is it insane for someone who collects music for the better part of 30 years and has spent years and years ripping his collection? Not really. My collection at 38,000 songs is a far, far cry from the Cloud Player limit, but it's also well outside the iTunes Match limit (and so I was forced to use both until recently - iTunes Match as my primary for 25,000 and Cloud Player as my storage of everything, and I'd swap out things when I needed to. The Amazon app has eliminated iTunes Match all together.)

You have to understand something. People like me don't have this much music so we can listen to it every single day from start to finish. It's because we're haunted by music. I literally cannot be without all this music because it's in my head and then I have to hear it. And enough of what I have is not and probably never will be on Spotify/Mog/etc. that the services just aggravate me. "Out of print" means "completely unavailable" in the digital world, while dirt-cheap copies of these albums sit in used record stores all over the world. But believe me, I've tried to minimize my collection and live on "the essentials." I found out that drives me crazy after a while. It's the same for others like me. I need variety. I listen to different music all day long, every day. My mood changes like the wind. I know that most people are content to listen to a handful of albums over and over and over. My wife is like this. I can't understand it. And that's why I need to have all this music around me. I've been buying music for the better part of 30 years now. At times multiple albums a week - very frequently when I was younger. If I still had ALL of that and hadn't sold lots of it off over time, I can easily see having many times more than I have now. Maybe it doesn't sound so insane to you now?

ArtOfWarfare · Aug 8, 2012

malnar said:
You have to understand something. People like me don't have this much music so we can listen to it every single day from start to finish. It's because we're haunted by music. I literally cannot be without all this music because it's in my head and then I have to hear it. And enough of what I have is not and probably never will be on Spotify/Mog/etc. that the services just aggravate me. "Out of print" means "completely unavailable" in the digital world, while dirt-cheap copies of these albums sit in used record stores all over the world. But believe me, I've tried to minimize my collection and live on "the essentials." I found out that drives me crazy after a while. It's the same for others like me. I need variety. I listen to different music all day long, every day. My mood changes like the wind. I know that most people are content to listen to a handful of albums over and over and over. My wife is like this. I can't understand it. And that's why I need to have all this music around me. I've been buying music for the better part of 30 years now. At times multiple albums a week - very frequently when I was younger. If I still had ALL of that and hadn't sold lots of it off over time, I can easily see having many times more than I have now. Maybe it doesn't sound so insane to you now?

I do understand your need for variety, and I similarly don't understand how some other people can listen to the same albums year after year.

Unlike you, I'm content with Spotify. I don't need specific songs most of the time (and when I do, I have them,) most of the time I'm just looking for a particular mood and am content with telling Spotify (the Moodify app to be more specific) and letting it show me new music.

revelated · Aug 9, 2012

malnar said:
You have to understand something. People like me don't have this much music so we can listen to it every single day from start to finish. It's because we're haunted by music. I literally cannot be without all this music because it's in my head and then I have to hear it. And enough of what I have is not and probably never will be on Spotify/Mog/etc. that the services just aggravate me. "Out of print" means "completely unavailable" in the digital world, while dirt-cheap copies of these albums sit in used record stores all over the world. But believe me, I've tried to minimize my collection and live on "the essentials." I found out that drives me crazy after a while. It's the same for others like me. I need variety. I listen to different music all day long, every day. My mood changes like the wind. I know that most people are content to listen to a handful of albums over and over and over. My wife is like this. I can't understand it. And that's why I need to have all this music around me. I've been buying music for the better part of 30 years now. At times multiple albums a week - very frequently when I was younger. If I still had ALL of that and hadn't sold lots of it off over time, I can easily see having many times more than I have now. Maybe it doesn't sound so insane to you now?

Doesn't sound insane to me, it sounds weird, quite frankly.

Your wife's "rotate limited albums" methodology would annoy me. But then one must ask if it's that her taste is limited or if she's just being pragmatic. Perhaps she really does enjoy 2,000 different albums but not enough to listen to them beyond the first cut.

My music library is roughly 5,000 songs deep which spans about 15 years. I do add to it every year, but the fact is I don't listen to hardly any of it. The bulk of what I do listen to is stuff that I bought from Amazon MP3. My reasoning is simple; my taste changed as I got older, but also I might buy an album to support an artist. I might buy collections from certain artists who have inspired me. And in some cases, back before these new fangled auto-ma-whatsits we call MP3s, we had CD singles which let you buy the best songs without buying the full CD. A lot of what I have consist of singles that I've bought or acquired over the years before they stopped selling singles in the US. My library spans genres; the only things I don't have are death metal and techno which I find to be garbage.

I keep them all for now because it gives me a variety of music that someone I meet might be interested in. It's a topic of conversation but also a way to introduce others to different artists and styles of music.

To your point about not being able to listen to the same music over and over, to me that's the reason for things like SKY.FM and others where they can play music of a genre you're in the mood for. Then you can hear new music that's at least similar to music you do enjoy. I can't just shuffle what I have in the library because I don't want to go from Sam Cooke to Motorhead during a commute to work, but at the same time I don't want to limit myself to a playlist of songs either. My preference is to have something or someone else play a genre I enjoy of random songs where I don't know what will come up, but I know I'll enjoy it because I have an itch for that genre. If I like the song enough, SoundHound it and add it to my collection.

imthenachoman · Aug 9, 2012

nibus said:
See my previous post - https://forums.macrumors.com/posts/15385572/

malnar said:
Amazon definitely uses your own ID3 tags, as I have very specific changes I make to every one of my albums (artist listed last name first, album title listed with year in parenthesis (ex: (2012) Album Title). Everything I upload is exactly as I expect it to be in that regard.

Two different answers. Well that is interesting.

----------

Also, tiny request everyone. This post is about Amazon and it's service. All these tangential discussions about how much music you have or MP3 vs AAC and all that, they just kind of drown out the relevant information.

:-/

Just a thought...

nibus · Aug 10, 2012

imthenachoman said:
Two different answers. Well that is interesting.

We could be talking about different things - I'm talking solely about songs that are matched. The matched songs from amazon are identical to the ones in the store. They have copyright information and even the Amazon song ID number, plus 600x600 artwork.

However for your own uploads I believe it does keep your tags, but I'm not positive. Again I did this testing the first night it was out and only matched about 10-12 albums.

blybug · Aug 10, 2012

milo said:
Sorry, I don't believe you. I don't know if you're mistaken or lying, but there's no way that every last thing available on the iTunes store is matched.

Well for me it took a few iterations and scans, manually fixing some tags and song lengths...but I can tell you that now when I look through my list of 3470 "Uploads"...they are all indeed songs that are not* in the iTunes store. AC/DC and such, mashups, remixes, local independent bands, bootlegs, live recordings. Everything else has been correctly categorized as Matched (9479) or Purchased (4771).

*one annoying caveat is that there is a subset of songs I purchased from iTunes as 128AAC-DRM that are no longer in the store for various reasons, but are being counted as Uploads rather than Purchases.

ScottYelich · Aug 10, 2012

getting old

milo said:
That's just how it works. The software scans your entire library, the only way to avoid that is by hacking it to hide some of your music. Sure, it's possible to test on a few songs but saying that without explanation makes it sound like you either don't understand how the service works, or you didn't really test it out.

look, this is getting old. If I didn't state previously (I thought I did), then I will state again: I used LAME in the late 90s to convert most of my favorite tunes to mp3 (192, 256 and 320vbr). Tagging is probably minimal due to tagging always being somewhat hit or miss. If iTunes is matching based on tagging, then I will later try to fiddle with my tags to see if that helps.

Finally, I'm not sure why people are so concerned what my library set up is. You know, if Itunes and iPhoto actually even allowed you to move files between different libraries, I might have a better setup. As it is, I have a mac mini with an external usb where I have (multiple) itunes and iphoto libraries -- but mostly 1 large library for each. So, what do I have in iTunes on my 1/2 a dozen other macs? NOTHING. So, you start up itunes, import a few test songs and test match. It's really not rocket science.

I forget which key it is -- holding option while launching? whatever -- you get to choose the library to use (and the app seems to remember for the next time). Finally, I found some software by some company (sleepy cat?) that seems to allow me to move music between libraries. $20 well spent for a feature that apple should be providing inherently.

Someone else said the failure is mine. Is it? it's my failure because the software works poorly for me? I guess that makes you feel better about yourself, whatever. Finally, I really just don't have a lot of time to (constantly be) upgrading and converting my music "library" ... I have old mp3s (again, that didn't come from napster or other places -- hell, they might even have worked better IF that had come from there since they would probably be tagged better... but they didn't) with probably questionable tagging. I know I have almost 0 cover art -- and that's probably based off tagging as well.

enough.

Scott

milo · Aug 10, 2012

blybug said:
Well for me it took a few iterations and scans, manually fixing some tags and song lengths...

Well if getting matches requires changing song lengths, I'd say that's an example of what's wrong with the service, not how good it is.

imthenachoman · Aug 12, 2012

nibus said:
We could be talking about different things - I'm talking solely about songs that are matched. The matched songs from amazon are identical to the ones in the store. They have copyright information and even the Amazon song ID number, plus 600x600 artwork.

However for your own uploads I believe it does keep your tags, but I'm not positive. Again I did this testing the first night it was out and only matched about 10-12 albums.

That makes sense. Thanks!

balamw · Jan 10, 2013

Amazon also just added AutoRip to take on iTunes/iTunes Match.

B

Amazon Cloud Player Upgraded with Scan and Match, 256 Kbps Audio

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