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Amazon Responds to Apple's iCloud With Music Storage Upgrades, iPad Player

couple of minor caveats,
1. Native audio files are seen as taking up space - .wav, and I'm assuming .aiff also. havn't tried other high res formats (flac, apple lossless).
2. These formats don't play thru the ipad cloud player.
 
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iCloud is still better, Apple upgrades your music to a higher bit rate (and better for them as well since they only have to store a great majority of the music once). Amazon knows Apple has the advantage here and is desperate to keep customers from going over to iTunes.
 
Hmm, I went to a MP3 album I bought on Amazon last year and it still wants me to buy it again.
When does this go into affect?
 
HiRez said:
Can't blame Amazon for competing...but...did they really just lower the price to beat Apple's...a service that isn't even available yet? Sheesh, the whole industry just stands around and waits to react to Apple, they can't even set their own pricing without peeking. Pathetic.
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Agreed.

It seems that no one on planet earth has the mind capacity or the c*j*nes (will power, or b*lls) to do something that is better than what apple can/will do.
 
Not sure if this type of service makes sense if I am capped at 2GB of data a month.
 
MacRumors said:
- Cloud Player for iPad: Amazon has launched an iPad-optimized web player for music stored through the Cloud Drive service. Despite a lack of official support for iOS devices until now, Amazon Cloud Player has been partially functional, but the new changes should significantly increase usability for iPad customers.
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NO WAY!!! OMG THAT'S AMAZING! Can I please have a half-baked Amazon "cloud player" that should "increase in usability" at some point . . . when we already have DEDICATED tools and services that are fully a part of the Apple ecosystem! I can't wait!!

Hey, Amazon: You're good for books and some other stuff. Great checkout system, and I get recommendations too. Beyond that, no one really gives a damn. You're an online Walmart. You have no cachet. So please release your pretend-iPad that's also "partially functional" (seems to be the trend these days) so we can pan it already and move on.
 
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*LTD* said:
So please release your pretend-iPad that's also "partially functional" (seems to be the trend these days) so we can pan it already and move on.
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At least you're keeping an open mind and are willing to examine their offering before coming to a conclusion.

:rolleyes:
 
Forgive my ignorance, but is there a reason why Amazon doesn't create a native app for their Cloud Player for iOS? The web-based player has improved, but a real app would certainly be a more polished experience. :confused:
 
macduke said:
My biggest concern with iCloud is the storage space. What sucks is if you're a user of multiple iOS devices. For instance, I have iOS 5b2 installed on my iPad 2 and iPhone 4, and every night when I plug them in they say in the morning that iCloud couldn't finish the backup because it ran out of space. Well ok, that's going to be a problem for a whole bunch of users. I don't want to have separate iCloud accounts for each device. As it is, I can't use my iTunes account with all my purchases on iCloud. They have to be separate. A lot of people are going to be confused unless Apple fixes this stuff up. Right now iCloud is rather confusing, but it's still a beta.

If you have multiple iOS devices, then shouldn't Apple give you more free storage? Why penalize users who buy more of their stuff? What's the point of having backups if it always says its full? Or is this just a beta issue?
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Since you have a copy of iOS 5, you must be a registered legitimate developer and therefore you have direct channels of communication to give Apple exactly that sort of feedback. Or am I missing something?
 
AidenShaw said:
At least you're keeping an open mind and are willing to examine their offering before coming to a conclusion.

:rolleyes:
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It'll be a snoozer. But feel free to wait and see.

Competitors will need something mind-blowing to even make a dent. And Amazon is no HP + Rubinstein, or a Samsung who with even their deep experience is barely able to make anyone notice.
 
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TG1 said:
Forgive my ignorance, but is there a reason why Amazon doesn't create a native app for their Cloud Player for iOS? The web-based player has improved, but a real app would certainly be a more polished experience. :confused:
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Laziness, cost-savings, to be platform-neutral... you pick one.
 
TG1 said:
Forgive my ignorance, but is there a reason why Amazon doesn't create a native app for their Cloud Player for iOS? The web-based player has improved, but a real app would certainly be a more polished experience. :confused:
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Apple wouldn't allow it and/or they want to push people to Android and presumably the upcoming Amazon tablet.

Google doesn't offer it for Google Music either, and it sucks. I love Google Music overall but lack of iOS compatibility (yeah you can get it running over Safari but it is clunky and unpredictable).

I actually think I prefer Amazon to Google Music now, however. The ability to re-download the stuff you upload (Google doesn't allow this) and an iPad player that actually works...I think I'll be moving to Amazon and sending Google Music to pasture. For now.

As for the whiners about lossless, none of them allow it. Google Music takes FLAC but converts it to 320kbps MP3 on upload. The reason for this is simply the massive size of lossless audio. Do you really want to stream lossless to a mobile device? Not likely. Add to that the fact that only 1 or 2% are "audiophiles" who even notice the difference between lossless and 256k MP3 let alone AAC (which is vastly superior - but who really notices?!)
 
iCloud was a bit of a disappointment for my needs, at least how it interacts with music. Basically it's just iTunes in the cloud instead of iTunes on your home computer. I want to be able to access my music via a web browser which Google and Amazon allow. It's nice to be able to pull up a web browser at work and just play my music.

Now I just wish either would allow me to setup "share" access to my library so I could share my collection with friends. I'm sure the record labels would have a stroke if either allowed that though, so it's just a dream of mine at this point.
 
Wirelessly posted (Mozilla/5.0 (iPhone; U; CPU iPhone OS 4_2_1 like Mac OS X; en-us) AppleWebKit/533.17.9 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/5.0.2 Mobile/8C148 Safari/6533.18.5)

Thus begins the cloud wars...
 
BC2009 said:
I fully agree. Plus iCloud will give me cloud backups of my device, document syncing, and support for app-data syncing between various instances of the same app on multiple devices (assuming app developers take advantage of the API). Music storage is the least of my concerns since my music does not take much space on my device compared to apps or movies.



It is certainly better than what Amazon previously offered, but those of us in the US typically don't plan on using our limited costly data plans to constantly stream music from iCloud (or Amazon). It makes far more sense to just store the music on the device unless you have a huge collection of music. And iCloud will still let you store the ones you most want to listen to now, and then get the ones you forgot to sync when you want them. I for one prefer to have my music & movies on my device and not be dependent on the cloud connectivity to get to my stuff (i.e.: i prefer the replicate / work-locally / replicate model). To me the "cloud" makes for a good fall-back solution when I go on vacation and forgot to sync the kid's favorite movie (still waiting for Apple to announce movies over iCloud).

This is especially true with my iPad since i want it to sync to my iPhone, but often it is not on 3G since I don't like to pay for the monthly plan unless I am going on vacation. Instead, I can use the iPad while riding in the car or anyplace without connectivity, and then have my apps do their replication when I am online.

I think Apple is the only one who gets the part of the "cloud" that pertains to apps. Google thinks you should be online-all-the-time (e.g.: maps, gmail, etc...). Amazon thinks the cloud is only about a hard-drive in the sky with music streaming. Apple is the only one creating an API to allow the "pick up where you left off on your other device" model and "allow me to actually get something done while offline and then replicate changes when back online".

Too many folks think "cloud = music streaming" -- personally, if I wanted an iPod, I would have bought an iPod. I bought an iPhone and iPad for apps -- music is a peripheral function to me.
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Even if you have a huge collection of music, the majority of it rots from it's rare times one ever listens to it. There is a tipping point in which human beings collect too much of any type of good or service and end up wasting their money.
 
Celeron said:
Personally I think this is awesome. I get a lot of music from Amazon. Its cheaper a lot of times than iTunes. $0.69 vs. $1.29. I'll take Amazon please. Amazon has also been doing DRM free music since the beginning, something I also have an appreciation for.

I like that I can keep all my Amazon.com purchased music "in the cloud" for free and not have to store them locally, if I don't want to.

There's a lot of hate in this thread and I'm not sure why.
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Agree!! and you don't need to wait it to load up to your iDevices, it's always there for you to listen on the street!! Cool thing is i can now stream my music from amazon thru airplay too :)
 
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