Amazon Cloud Player Updates

If you read my book, The Ultimate Digital Music Guide, you know I'm cautiously enthusiastic about so-called cloud music services, where you upload your own music to cloud-based music servers and then have it served back to you, on any connected device. One of the first and most popular of these cloud music services is Amazon Cloud Player. As I noted in my book, the original Cloud Player service wasn't perfect (limited to just MP3 and AAC files, not WMA), but offered some pretty good features, all in all.

Well, Amazon just upgraded the Cloud Player by giving it "scan and match" functionality. What this means is that instead of having to upload all the tracks in your digital music collection, Cloud Player scans your collection and tries to match it with tracks in its official digital collection. If a match is found, Cloud Player doesn't have to upload your version of the track; instead, it serves you back the copy of the track housed in Amazon's library. If your track doesn't have a match in Amazon's library, then Cloud Player uploads your track to its servers. This is the way iTunes Match works, and it definitely saves on upload time, assuming most of your tracks are common enough to be included in Amazon's master digital library.

With this new functionality comes higher-quality playback. All scan-and-match tracks are served back to you at 256Kbps, which, while not lossless quality, isn't bad. Pricing, however, changes. The free service is now limited to a paltry 250 tracks; if you have more than this in your library (and you do), you'll have to subscribe to Cloud Player Premium for $24.99/year. This lets you store 250,000 tracks, not including any Amazon MP3 purchases, which don't contribute to the limit.

(BTW, Amazon is pushing the new 256Kbps streaming as an upgrade to its previous service, but it's not, not really. Previously, Amazon would play back your tracks at the original bitrate they were ripped at, so if you ripped at something higher than 256Kbps, this new option is actually a downgrade. Of course, if you ripped or purchased a track at a lower bitrate, then the new 256Kbps playback is an improvement. I guess it all depends, eh?)

To add scan-and-match functionality, Amazon had to work out licensing agreements with all the major record labels, as they view any serving of their content as something they get to charge for, even if it's your own purchased music played back by you, personally. (What a bunch of asses.) Hence the new subscription scheme; Amazon has to pay the labels, and this is how.

Anyway, this positions Amazon Cloud Player, even with the Premium option, quite favorably compared to Apple's iTunes Match service. iTunes Match charges the same $24.99/year but only lets you store 25,000 tracks. You also get the new ability to scan-and-match not just MP3 and AAC files, but also WMA, FLAC, and OGG format files. (You can't upload these formats to serve from the cloud, but Cloud Player will find them on your hard disk and match them to other-format versions in its library.)

If you want pure cloud service from the original tracks stored on your computer's hard drive, the Google Play Music cloud service is still the better choice. It's free (for now, anyway), and uploads all the major formats -- MP3, WMA, AAC, FLAC, and so forth. You are limited to 20,000 tracks, however, which could be an issue for those of us with larger libraries.

Then there's the serve-it-yourself option, which you have with apps such as Audiogalaxy and Subsonic. These programs turn your home PC into an always-on cloud server, and thus let you serve your own library from your own PC to any connected device, no middlemen involved. This option is a bit more technical, but worth checking out.

Still and all, Amazon's new Cloud Player developments are interesting and make sense for a lot of music lovers. That $24.99/year fee is a small price to pay to access your whole library from the cloud, and get up and running quickly.