Amazon Releases Cloud-Based Music Service 222
c0lo writes "Right after rumors that Google was preparing to take on iTunes service with a digital music store of its own, Amazon has announced that it's entering the fight with a cloud-based music service of its own. From the article: 'Amazon Cloud Drive is a "personal disk drive in the cloud," while Amazon Cloud Player is, well, a Web-based music player. That's right--Amazon Cloud Drive will be something like Google's rumored digital music locker, a cloud-based storage system for all of your tunes.'"
Too bad I don't download music anymore. (Score:3, Interesting)
I only really listen to streaming music these days, with Spotify and Grooveshark.
OK, with one exception: Downloading stuff to put on a USB drive for the car radio. But this doesn't really have a place there either.
Alternatives to Corporate Clouds (Score:5, Interesting)
I'm always distrustful of a large companies managing my music collection. What happens when they can't make a profit and shut the service down? At best I have to deal with retrieving my media, at worst I could potentially lose access to everything.
Most folks who read slashdot probably have all of the pieces they need to just build this service themselves. Broadband connected computer, iPhone or Android device, 3G or WiFi connection to the remote device or computer.
If you have a media server at home or just a computer running Windows, OSX or Linux why not consider running Subsonic (http://www.subsonic.org)? Using subsonic I can stream my media to any computer using the in browser player and I with a client for my iPhone (isubms) I can stream to my iPhone over 3G or Wifi.
I've been using this as my own personal Pandora radio in the car and it works great. The nice part about the client app for my iPhone is it can cache content for when I don't have 3G coverage.
The total cost for this project was about $20 bucks since I was already paying for broadband and 3G cellphone service. I bought the $10 euro streaming license for subsonic and the $4.99 iPhone app. If you have an Android phone your costs are even cheaper as I believe there is a free client app for Android devices.
This is the solution I've been looking for... For years!
I know I sound like an infomercial but no longer having to remember to sync my device and having my entire music collection at my finger tips where ever I am is awesome.
Re:It's cloud-based alright (Score:4, Interesting)
There's a small, yet significant, difference between Amazon Cloud Drive and MP3.com. MP3.com was ripping tons of CDs. They then had you insert your CD in the drive so you could get access to their ripped version online. Amazon is letting users upload their own files. Yes, these could be pirated files or files that the user owns, but this is the user's responsibility. Plus, unless the user shares their Amazon login information with others, they will be the only ones able to access those music files. It should be easy to weed out TOS violators (people who store pirated MP3s and then let others log in to retrieve them) without shutting down the entire service.
Besides, if this becomes MP3.com vs RIAA: Round 2, I hope that Amazon points out that their Cloud Music service could be replicated by anyone with a web hosting account and FTP software. My hosting account has unlimited storage. (I know, it's really not "unlimited", but I can store more than the 5GB that Amazon is offering.) If I made a folder called "My Music", which I didn't tell anyone about, and uploaded my MP3s there, they would be backed up the same as with Amazon Cloud Drive. For additional security, I could password protect the folder so if someone stumbled upon mysite.com/My Music/, they wouldn't be able to get in. For even more security, if the host so offered it, I could put the files outside of the website's root so they would only be available over FTP.
Basically, if Sony is allowed to say that Amazon's Cloud Storage is illegal, than so is any web hosting service. After all, just because I'm not uploading MP3s of Sony music to my web space doesn't mean I *can't*. And since I theoretically could do this, why would a web hosting service be legal while Amazon Cloud Drive would be illegal. (Especially since web hosting services are specifically designed to share files out and you need to take action to prevent this.)