![]() ![]() Bottom lineĪlthough I’m glad to see Amazon bring its desktop app to the Mac, in many ways it’s less functional and more difficult to use than the Web-based interface. ![]() Visiting the album page on shows me a banner indicating I’ve already bought it. For example, I bought Mozart: Complete Symphonies (The VoxBox Edition) but wouldn’t know it from looking. One problem I noticed, though, was that it doesn’t indicate whether or not you’ve purchased something previously. Click the Store button in the upper right corner and the UI shifts to one in which you can browse and buy music. One nice feature is the integration of Amazon’s MP3 store into the app. The app has an integrated version of Amazon’s MP3 store, but doesn’t show you if you’ve already bought something like the Web store (top) does. Now every time I try to upload new music, I’m forced to redownload the uploader app. In the desktop app you select File > Import Music To Cloud Library, click OK to be taken to your Amazon account, click the Import this music button to launch the AIR application, and then pick and upload your music. Unfortunately, uploading new content to your account still requires the horrendous AIR uploader app. When you quit the app and relaunch, it remembers where you were, but not what you were playing. You can use keyboard shortcuts to control playback while the app is the active one. I then played the exact same track using the Web interface without problem. track from a show I saw in Vegas, and got a window saying the file format wasn’t recognized, also implying that the file itself might be corrupt. You can create and listen to playlists, play entire albums, or double-click a song to start it playing-most of the time. The app can’t play this track, but the Web version can. That’s a big improvement over the downloader app required before Amazon launched its desktop player for the Mac. On the right is a handy (and hideable) sidebar that lets you drag and drop to add tracks to playlists, or to download songs or albums to your computer. Also, the names of the headers and even their relative positions aren’t the same as on the Web. In the middle you see your selected content and can sort by various headers, although you can’t choose which ones you want displayed. In a column on the left, you can choose to view content in the cloud or on your computer locally, and then drill down by playlists, artists, albums, songs, or genres. The interface is exactly like the the Windows version-enough so that it looks to be ported over from that version. That was my first indication that the software needs a lot of work. And after installing on several different Macs, the behavior with loading up cloud tracks was wildly inconsistent. And on a second launch of the app, nearly 15,000 of those tracks were gone and had to re-sync-very, very slowly and with intermittent bursts of visual feedback. With my 40,000-track library, the process took a good seven minutes to load everything up. All rights reserved.After a first launch during which it syncs up a list of your music (but doesn’t attempt to download all your tracks) and your playlists, you’ll see everything from your Cloud Player. Amazon's Cloud Player will certainly face a stiff challenge when they launch their own streaming music services, especially given Google's control over Android and Apple's control over iPhone and iTunes. Google and Apple have been rumored to be hard at work on their own cloud-based players, but it looks like Amazon beat them to the punch. The most comparable service to Cloud Drive is probably Grooveshark, which also lets you upload your music, though Amazon has several major advantages in its MP3 store, its longstanding payment system and its stronger brand recognition. Both players allow users to upload their music, create playlists and organize their music.Īnd because it's a cloud-based platform, users can access their music and settings from any compatible computer or Android device. It's $1 per GB after that.Ĭloud Player comes in two flavors, an app for the web and an Android app counterpart. Users are given 5 GB of free storage, but can get 20 GB if they purchase an album through Amazon. The new Cloud Player service adds a new "Save to Amazon Cloud Drive" button for saving MP3s to the cloud, as well as an option to upload music from a hard drive to a user's Cloud Drive. ( Mashable) - Amazon has just entered the streaming music business with the launch of Cloud Player, a music player that lets anyone upload their music to Amazon's servers and play them via the web or Android.
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