Amazon's Cloud Player went live in the UK today, allowing users this side of the pond to store and play music over the web or via dedicated apps on smart phones -- a feature which has been available in the US for over a year.
The launch comes a few weeks after the retail giant announced its expanded range of Kindle Fire tablets are also heading our way, along with its Dropbox rival Amazon Cloud Drive -- a service which gives you 5GB of free online storage and is upgradable up to 1,000GB (for a hefty £320 per year).
The new Cloud Player will not eat into your Drive storage, however. Instead you can get space for 250 songs for free, with a premium 250,000-song option available at £22 a year.
I tried it out and when I first logged in, I was met with all of my previous Amazon music purchases ready to go. Better yet, any MP3s you buy through the website are stored for no additional charge and don't count against your storage space -- a sensible incentive to buy through the company.
You can access the Cloud Player anywhere with up to 10 personal devices allowed to be registered, besting iTunes, which only allows for 5. You can get going straight through the Amazon UK website from your Mac or PC, or download the iPhone or Android app for your smart phone.
From the mobile app you can access all of your Cloud music and even download it straight to the device. From my brief personal experience of it today it seems to work really well, with 3G streaming to my knackered old iPhone 4 working seamlessly.
The Cloud Player works in a similar way to iTunes Match. All the music you import is scanned and matched to Amazon's catalogue of around 20 million songs. Matched music is instantly available in Cloud Player as high-quality 256kbps audio, and any MP3 and AAC files that can't be matched are uploaded.
Match also costs £22 a year, but offers space for only 25,000 non-iTunes-bought to be uploaded -- a tenth of Amazon's effort.
To celebrate its Cloud Player launch, Amazon has issued a promotional code for 99p album downloads, which can be immediately transferred to Cloud Player once they've been purchased to get you going.
What do you think of Amazon's Cloud Player? Will it be the deciding factor to get you using Amazon's Music Store? Or will it fuel your Kindle Fire buying decision? Let me know in the comments or over on our Facebook Wall.
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anonymous 18 September, 2012 18:44
Just tried to use it but prices to upgrade to Premium service are in US Dollars; Amazon won't let me use any of my Credit of Debit cards.
anonymous 19 September, 2012 16:34
Bought it last night. Annual price £21.99p. I uploaded 7032 songs from my external hard drive and it took about 7 hours. I'm very pleased with it as it gives me an additional back up for a low price. I plan to buy a Nexus tablet next week so this will allow me to only stream the songs I want. I'll sell my Kindle and my mp3 player now as I won't need them after next week.
anonymous 19 September, 2012 20:14
I use Google Music to do the same, except it's free. It's not *officially* available outside the US, but it's easy as pie to use a proxy to sign up, and once you do there are no access limitations. I don't know how you could justify spending £22 for Amazon's option when this is available.
anonymous 19 September, 2012 23:17
its a shame the Android app doesn't let you specify a download location. Streaming doesn't work on the tube and I will quickly run out of space on my phone's internal storage...
Donald Joseph Meyer 23 September, 2012 17:26
A warning about playlist management on Cloud Player:
Amazon allows you to upload your playlists only once: while you are actually uploading your MP3 files. Once your MP3 music is on the Cloud Player, you will not be able to "upload" new playlists that you may create on iTunes.
I am in the habit of making fairly long playlists on iTunes (using Genius for example). Duplicating these lists by hand on the Cloud Player would be quite tedious. I have spoken with Amazon's technicians on at least 4 occasions. On the fourth call, the technician finally admitted that the Cloud Player does not allow new playlists to be uploaded once the actual music files are on the Cloud Player: you must make new playlists by hand on the Cloud Player itself.
anonymous 24 September, 2012 09:42
I signed up for the Amazon service a few days ago (I'm in the UK FWIW) and last night I finished uploading my music (approx. 14,000 songs). I think the service is excellent value for money (£21.99 a year) but I had some issues:
1. The track matching is terrible. Out of those 14,000 MP3s it failed to match about 6,000 - most of which seemed to be in the vast Amazon library. Consequently it took about 60 hours to upload the songs via my DSL connection.
2. The album art matching is awful, especially for compilation albums. What's worse is that you cannot change the album art. You can edit other details - track name, artist, year, etc. but not album art. Also, some albums display with the correct artwork in the web player but not on your device. All the MP3s I uploaded had embedded artwork but it seems to get ignored. What's worse is there have been people complaining about these album art issues for 18 months but Amazon still haven't fixed them.
But having a player that works on iOS and Android is a real bonus - and your review failed to mention that Amazon will let you authorise 10 devices - I'm pretty sure iTunes only allows 5.
Because of the art and matching issues I might be tempted to try the Google service when it eventually launches in the UK.
anonymous 28 September, 2012 13:06
OK, it's fab, & I try to never criticise "free", but there are a few things people should know.
1) Don't even think about using it on Linux. We know the Amazon download manager doesn't work: be assured that you get the same disfunction if you try to upload.
2) Don't try to use Chrome for uploading from any OS. Amazon cloud can't cope.
anonymous 28 February, 2013 16:27
I subscribed to the Amazon cloud player, but have to say I am disappointed with
1) Album art work mismatches - extremely common and cannot be ammended.
2) The artist compilation is wrong so often and cannot be amended
3) On the album information window too many have a shaded to grey element - this means where this occurs you cannot correct information - happens too often with album name, artist and genre.
Why is Amazon not addressing these issues immediately? My emails to them gave the impression that this is a new issue when it patently not. Back to iTunes me thinks.