Amazon Matches iTunes Match With New 'Audio Upgrade' Feature 157
New submitter bostonidealist writes "Just after the July 6th 1-year anniversary of its unlimited music storage promotion (and presumably after early subscribers have all renewed their annual subscriptions), Amazon.com has changed the way its Cloud Player and Cloud Drive services work. Starting today, music uploaded to a Cloud Drive will count against its owner's Cloud Drive quota and will not be accessible through Cloud Player. Further, music files previously uploaded to Cloud Player or Cloud Drive are being automatically converted to 256 Kbps audio whenever Amazon 'has the rights to do so' and new audio files uploaded to Cloud Player will automatically be checked against Amazon's music database in iTunes Match-like fashion. One of the appeals of Amazon's Cloud Player service up to this point has been that users could pay a flat fee and store an unlimited number of their own music files (with their own tags, artwork, and audio data intact). Now, Amazon is automatically replacing users' previously uploaded data with its own, without allowing users to opt in/out."
Cloud services are for idiots. (Score:5, Insightful)
> Now, Amazon is automatically replacing users' previously uploaded data with its own, without allowing users to opt in/out
*Exactly* why cloud services are for retards only. You would have to be a complete moron to trust a third party with your personal data. A complete and utter moron.
Store this! (Score:5, Insightful)
The point of forcibly replacing your music with a good-quality one is so they can massively reduce storage. Now they just need one copy of each song.
Which makes it doubly bizarre they're now counting it against your cloud storage -- it's not even stored in your "piece" -- all that's stored are a few bytes of an ID pointing into their song database.
music laundry (Score:5, Insightful)
upload pirated music get clean copies .. ;D
Paranoid slashdotters 1: rest of the world: 0 (Score:5, Insightful)
Welcome to the cloud! Where your data is our data.
As "the cloud" is getting more traction, expect worse things to happen. We are still in the acceptance phase.
Very much like Amazon in everything (Score:3, Insightful)
This is very much like Amazon in everything - you have no rights, only the obligation to pay them and have them do pretty much what they want with your data. There is no effective SLA, and if you don't like what they do only recourse is trying to win over a megacorp in court.
So ... You use their crap ? Blame yourself!
Re:What happens if it's already higher than 256? (Score:5, Insightful)
The summary seemed quite clear to me, all music is being converted to 256kbps. It didn't say 'upgraded to', though I suspect Amazon may try to spin it like that.
What is likely happening here is that Amazon has a file of "Stairway to Heaven" in 256kbps on their server, and in order to save space everybody who uploads their own personal copy of "Stairway to Heaven" has it substituted with Amazon's version, so instead of 100 copies of various version of the song on their server, you just have 100 people accessing the same file, and guess what! Yes, that file you share with 99 other people, it counts towards your quota.
It's brilliant, they sell the same piece of hard drive space 100's and 100's of times over.
Re:Cloud services are NOT for idiots. (Score:5, Insightful)
While a cloud service provider isn't necessarily like Amazon, this is a prime example of why the cloud can't be trusted: you are at the mercy of the service provider, and if they alter the deal you can only pray they don't alter it further.
Re:Cloud services are for idiots. (Score:5, Insightful)
The intention of cloud music services like Amazon's (and Google's, and Apple's, and Ubuntu's...) is to provide a convenient way to access your music from anywhere at any time.
No the purpose of cloud players is to keep track of what users listen to.