Take Your Music With You and Play It Anywhere with The Amazon Cloud Player

How we buy, store, and listen to music has changed tremendously thanks to smartphones and MP3 players. We’ve become accustomed to listening to our favorite music anytime and anywhere we want to. Unfortunately, finding a safe, cost-effective place to store your music is more difficult.

It is really easy to accumulate a massive digital music collection between downloads and what you rip from your CD collection, but you always risk losing your collection if you store it locally.

Amazon has created a solution built into their Cloud Drive service called Amazon Cloud Player. Now you can truly access and listen to your music from any Web browser or Android device.

Amazon has had cheap cloud-based data storage for a while, but they recently launched Amazon Cloud Drive as an easy-to-use, affordable storage solution. You can save all your photos and documents there, and access them from anywhere if you have access to the internet.

Amazon decided that since people would store their music in cloud drive, they could make it easier to play their music directly from a Web browser with Cloud Player. Since Amazon Cloud Player is also linked to the Amazon MP3 store, you can choose to save your MP3s directly to the Cloud Player instead of or in addition to downloading the files.

Interface

The Cloud Player interface has a strong resemblance to most digital music players, including iTunes. Your music is organized by Songs, Albums, Artists, and Genres so you can easily navigate through your collection and get to the song you want to play. You can also use the Search bar to find music even faster.
Once you find the song you want to hear, just click the Play button, and your song will play immediately. If your internet connection is not fast, you may experience some pauses during the course of the song, but most songs stream quickly and start playing immediately in their original quality.
Amazon’s Cloud Player allows you to create playlists, control the volume, shuffle songs, and repeat songs just like your desktop digital music player. You can also quickly access a list of the songs you’ve purchased and saved to Cloud Player by clicking on the Latest Purchases list. If you want to upload music, click the Upload your music button, and you will be prompted to install the Amazon MP3 Uploader.

Using the Amazon Uploader

The Uploader is a lightweight Adobe Air application that can search your iTunes and Windows Media Player music collections to find songs to upload. You can also use it to Browse for music folders manually if you want a greater degree of control over what songs you upload. When you upload songs, Amazon files and organizes them for you, which saves a lot of work.

To upload songs with the Amazon Uploader:

1. Open the Uploader by clicking the Upload your music button on the Cloud Player.
2. The Uploader will search your PC for music in your iTunes and Windows Media Player libraries. If you want to specify the location of your music, click the browse for more music link.

3. Browse for the music you want to upload, and when you’ve selected the files or folders, click OK.

4. When you are ready, click the Start Upload button, and your files will be transferred to the Cloud Drive. As each file is uploaded it becomes available in the Cloud Player. New uploads also populate the Latest Uploads list, so you can get to them quickly.

Our Verdict About The Amazon Cloud Player:

The Amazon Cloud Player is intuitive and easy to use. If you’ve used iTunes or any desktop media player, you will feel at home. Uploading your local mp3s is easy to do, and you do not have to worry about organizing the files, because Cloud Player does it for you. You can access your music from any Web browser, so there are no platform dependencies, and the user interface is the same in every browser.

The songs playback at their original quality level, and if you have a speedy internet connection, you will not notice any pauses or skips as the songs stream to your computer.The native Android application makes it even easier to play your favorite songs when you are on the go.

If you want a very affordable way to create a backup of your music collection, Amazon Cloud Player is a great choice. Since you can also store your documents, pictures, and other data, you only have one place to upload your files. The added convenience of automatically saving your music to the Amazon Cloud Player after you buy it online makes it very easy to protect your investment.