Wednesday, April 6, 2011

Amazon Cloud Drive and Player

I'm really liking the new Amazon Cloud Player.  I've had a weakness for Amazon MP3s for a while.  Seriously, what a perfect way to buy music - when we buy CDs, we always rip them to MP3 anyway, copy them to carry in the car, and store them in a CD binder.  We don't need or want the plastic case.  When I buy MP3 albums from Amazon, I don't have any of the extras - just MP3s I can burn to CD to have in the car, MP3s I can play on my computer or MP3 player, and they cost much less than buying a CD in the store.

Anyway, with the new Amazon Cloud Drive, when I buy an MP3 song or album from Amazon, I can immediately save it to my Cloud Drive.  (All Amazon customers automatically get 5GB Cloud storage for free, so if you're an Amazon customer, you already have this, just accept the terms to get started.)  I can then listen to it immediately with the Amazon Cloud Player.

But what I'm liking best about this is that all my Amazon MP3 purchases are automatically backed up for me.  Before Cloud Drive, if you downloaded MP3s from Amazon and something happened to those MP3s - hard-drive crash for example - you were just out of luck.  If you wanted to replace them, you'd have to purchase them again.  Admittedly, I never lost any, but it was always a possibility.  I made sure to burn to CD or back up to an external hard-drive every time I downloaded an MP3 album, just so I'd have that back-up.  Now, with Cloud Drive, I can store all my Amazon MP3 purchases and download them anytime and anywhere.  Amazon MP3 purchases don't count against my storage quota, either so I can use my space to upload anything else I want - music, photos, video.  I'll probably end up uploading music so I can use the Cloud Player to play it from any Internet-connected computer.

Through the end of the year, Amazon is offering a free upgrade from 5GB to 20GB with any MP3 album purchase.  That includes even this one - The 99 Most Essential Opera Classics - which only costs 99¢ and I almost bought a couple weeks ago.  I'm glad I waited.  I bought it last night, saved all 99 songs to my Cloud Drive instead of having to download them and got 20GB of Cloud Drive storage for a year.  Can't beat that!
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