Amazon Music Ending Cloud MP3 Storage, Streaming Option (billboard.com) 107
Amazon is planning to retire its Music storage subscription service, the plan that enabled Amazon customers to upload their own music to the company's servers. From a report: Amazon Music Storage subscription plans, which let users upload music from their Mac or PC and stream them alongside the in-app on-demand and radio options, will be accepted until Jan. 15, 2018. Then, the service will run until January 2019, when it will be removed entirely. As of Monday this week, free plans -- which allow for 250 songs to be stored in the cloud -- are no longer able to upload new music to their MP3 locker.
Why (Score:4, Informative)
Why is Cloud based servers so bad for people..... This is the reason why. The shut up shop quickly
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The real culprit here is that actually FINDING it on amazon was a challenge, and their interface sucked. Amazon seems to be very much a "jack of all trades" company that does an "OK" job of a lot of things, but not enough to stand out and make them a "master" in a lot of fields.
Online retail is their bread and butter. Most of the other stuff they do is not as good as its competition.
Great Job (Score:4, Insightful)
Wait until everyone buys their Echo for Christmas - and then tell them they can't use it with their music post-purchase. I think that's called bait and switch.
Then you can sell them on your music subscription.
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Even for those with a substantial music collection, subscriptions are likely to offer value just because of their breadth.
The problem as I see it is that while the big subscription offerings truly are enormous in the size of their catalog, they are by no means complete. If you own a CD that's not in their catalog, you are going to be prevented from easily listening to it on an echo. I think that's a big mistake.
Re:Great Job (Score:4, Insightful)
This is how I feel.. Have just bought two echos, uploaded 30G of mp3s to Amazon, and now this?
Damn.
If nothing else, I have a heap of albums I can't get even with a subscription, that I now just can't play.
90 day return on the echo though I think, although then I've blown the money on the 1yr storage with Amazon anyway.. fuckers.
Data Stroage (Score:5, Funny)
Backup your data to the cloud they said, all your data will be safe they said... /deleted
Re:Data Stroage (Score:4, Funny)
What are good replacement options? (Score:2)
I absolutely loved this service. I'd upload my mp3s and get to play from the same library no matter what device I happened to be using. It really simplified library management.
Is there anything else out there like it? I'm a little tempted to just go with Plex and run it myself, but I always worry that my hardware will fail or my home internet connection will go down.
Re:What are good replacement options? (Score:5, Informative)
Yes, Google offers the exact same service.
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Yes, Google offers the exact same service.
For now ...
With Google your best bet is to hope that they forgot about the existence of a service, and will thus let it keep running by default.
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Google Play Music is not integrated with Google Drive.
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You need to report that as a content mismatch. That usually forces Google Play Music to actually use your version, not the server-matched version.
I say "usually" with a hefty dose of skepticism, as Google seem to be very slow to respond to error reports on Google Play Music.
In contrast, Spotify responds within hours and fixes content errors within a week or so, even going to the effort of asking for more information if they need to clarify something with you first.
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You could technically run Plex on a VPS, but you would be better served with something like MPD [musicpd.org] for music only.
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... except that Plex is also specifically terrible for some kinds of music. Even when I tell it to use my tags over those from online sources, Plex doesn't make use of the Composer, Soloist, Ensemble or Conductor tags at all. With Amazon, Google or Apple, at least I know that whatever garbage metadata it has is consistent with titles in their storefront, but with Plex, maybe their scraper did the right thing (i.e. use my tags, which are correct) and maybe it didn't and I can't even tell.
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Use Plex with a Synology or QNAP unit; it's probably your best bet and you can RAID1 your drives to mitigate the possibility of data loss.
If your home internet goes down regularly, that's a different conversation. If that level of reliability is your concern, you can probably do what you need with a VPS or EC2 instance and host it in the cloud, though you'll be paying monthly for the privilege.
Personally, I'd definitely implore you to take it into your own hands. Amazon was far from the first company to att
Re:What are good replacement options? (Score:5, Informative)
I have my music uploaded to Google Play, has worked well for me.
I also have a NAS at my house with everything on it, which both lets me stream at home without using bandwidth getting it from the cloud. It also means if Google pulls an Amazon here, I still have everything backed up (both on the NAS and my backups of the NAS).
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Quoting from a Google web page:
Google Play Music song storage limits
You can add up to 50,000 songs to Google Play Music from your personal music collection using Google Play Music for Chrome or Music Manager (up to 300MB per song). Once you've added your music, you can listen to it through the Google Play Music app and on your computer.
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Expect it to go away now that the competition is gone.
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Re:What are good replacement options? (Score:5, Informative)
iTunes Match is still around and if the songs are recognized (about 2/3rds) adds the benefit of upgrading those old 128kbit MP3s to 256kbit AACs by erasing the original copy and then downloading the "matched" copy.
iTunes exists on all major platforms but iTunes is far from the best music player...
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not a good option if you have a lot of live and alternate versions of songs. Some bands release a lot of legal soundboard recordings (King Crimson, Marillion) and a matching service simply doesn't react well when those songs are uploaded.
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Then you get the version you uploaded, same as the Amazon service. Upgrading poorly ripped 128kbit MP3s to clean 256kbit AAC isn't part of the service, it's a side effect of Apple optimizing the amount data they need to store everyone's music on iTunes Match. It's a nice freebie for those with lots of old poorly ripped music but is not guaranteed to work, even with lossless rips.
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Unmatched songs are uploaded to iCloud as-is, Amazon MP3 locker didn't perform _any_ way to upgrade your old songs to higher versions, nor did you propose a service that does so better than iTunes Match.
What"s your point?
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iTunes is far from the best music player
In the same way that Windows ME is far from the best OS I've ever had to use.
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That was my attempt at British humour through understatement...
It's on desktops that iTunes is pitiful though. On mobile devices it's just poor.
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Google has similar, but their app is a lot clunkier trying to upload a music library compared to Amazon's.
This is a service that I really liked and actively used. The ability to have one repository for music on one computer, then download and have it on any device, Android or iOS, Windows, or Mac, was quite nice.
Guess I get to choose between Google or Plex now.
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home-hosting your own cloud server. some options:
plex
subsonic
emby
even the somewhat old music player daemon
there are others. some are totally free but low support of apps and platforms. others cost for app support. I personally use plex and subsonic, and have written the FireOS (tv/stick) app for subsonic.
most rely on the fact that external USB hard drives are cheap these days. which they are. a $100 2-T drive from Costco can hold pretty much any mp3 collection (gets stickier if you're a flac fan), and bet
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While Plex supports both audio and video, you can't cache media locally on devices with Plex without paying $5/mo for a Plex Pass so your concerns about our remote connection will come into play more. If this is more for music you can use Subsonic [subsonic.org] or Airsonic [github.io] instead and spend much less/nothing to have local caching and a greater choice in playback apps.
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and with no stake of 'ownership' of the material posted here or commented here. There's a difference when one has a personal feeling of 'ownership' of the material, in this case, the files uploaded that are totally legal possessions from their original sources (cd, purchases, whatever), and a need to access those files again later.
Nobody really goes back to /. with the intention of going "hey, i want that post I made on June 13th, 2006".
apples-oranges.
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context of the comment was clear. just because you choose to ignore it doesn't make your comment salient.
another 'unlimited' service.. (Score:1)
gets shut down.
amazon must be hurting if the fringe mp3 'cloud' users here that actually took advantage of 'unlimited' are affecting their margins enough for them to shut it down.
if you use amazon for picture storage or backups, i'd start backing that shit up **NOW**
captcha: concern
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if you use amazon for picture storage or backups, i'd start backing that shit up **NOW**
The whole point of using a cloud service for backups is that it's just an offsite backup You obviously don't have to make another backup of it. Rather, you can just switch backup providers at any time. Automatic offsite backup is one of the clouds true killer apps, I think. The real danger is if people are foolish enough to store their one and only copy of important documents in a cloud service.
Anyhow, I don't think there's a danger of Amazon S3 or Glacier going away anytime soon. That would be a prett
I knew it! (Score:1)
Google did it. Amazon is doing it.
From the start I viewed this as a way to get pirates used to streaming services. Now, old pirates that uploaded their music and streamed are faced with a choice to either go back to your old ways are stick with streaming services. Of course they want the latter because they hope that you've somehow changed in this period of streaming music.
But have you?
I wonder how many mp3 files are sitting in S3? (Score:2)
A clever person could build an mp3 tool to discover, categorize, and play such content.
What was the point? (Score:1)
Call me a luddite, but why would you want to upload your mp3s to a cloud service? They're not exactly hefty files, and storage is cheap as it's ever been, plus there's software that makes managing libraries pretty easy. Putting them in the cloud seems like a good way to end up sans music when:
1. You find yourself in a place with bad reception
2. The service shuts down or undergoes maintenance
Strikes me as a solution to a problem that doesn't exist. Then again, I'd also venture that the decision to shut down
Re: What was the point? (Score:1)
Because echo is fucking awesome for listening to music, however there are a few albums I have that arenâ(TM)t on amazon unlimited (or any other music service). So obviously busting out my phone and loading Plex and choosing the album isnâ(TM)t difficult, but itâ(TM)s easier and faster just to ask Alexa to do it.
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Because it's nice to be able to access your collection from your car, work machine, phone, and other connected devices?
I would never put my content *only* in the cloud, but a copy? Why not?
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Call me a luddite, but why would you want to upload your mp3s to a cloud service? They're not exactly hefty files, and storage is cheap as it's ever been, plus there's software that makes managing libraries pretty easy. Putting them in the cloud seems like a good way to end up sans music when:
1. You find yourself in a place with bad reception 2. The service shuts down or undergoes maintenance
Strikes me as a solution to a problem that doesn't exist. Then again, I'd also venture that the decision to shut down the service was influence by the MAFIAA foaming at the mouth over potential piracy, so hats off to Amazon for providing a service that pisses them off.
Clearly it is more convenient for a lot of people. I don't suppose Amazon forced them at gunpoint to upload their mp3s to their cloud service.
It is amusing how on slashdot "I don't do X therefore no one else could possibly have a reason to do X" is used as an argument.
This is why i don't trust the cloud (Score:4, Insightful)
Amazon, Google, etc. They all launch a service, get people to use it, but not enough people, and then pull the plug.
I have Apple Cloud, whatever its called, for music storage, myself. And it's great, I can stream or pull down my music anywhere I go. But I still need to keep it on my computer (don't save any space), out of fear that they might pull the plug one day. Or just have a server crash.
These companies shouldn't just arbitrarily end services like these. If they have a lot of users, at least put the service up for bids from other developers or companies to take it over.
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I doubt that Amazon AWS S3 storage is going anywhere, since millions of people and businesses pay a lot of money to have that data hosted for them.
If you're relying on a free service to store your files for you, though, you're probably doing it wrong. I'd imagine that my "unlimited" free Google Photos storage account is going away at some point, for example, so I have my photos backed up on iCloud AND Microsoft OneDrive as well.
The good ol "3,2,1" rule for backups still applies. Make sure that you have 3 co
Just Tried on Monday (Score:3)
I just tried to do this exact thing on Monday. Try as I might, I couldn't get the songs to upload. All the web-based tutorials showed upload icons on the Amazon Music app, but it simply wasn't there on my system. Even Amazon's help pages still said it should work.
I have an Echo, and I just wanted to add a few CDs to it so that we could listen to them. The 250-song limit was already extremely restrictive.
What I really want is the ability to stream from my own server. This is a feature that Apple is likely to push, since I believe they've always supported in-house iTunes servers (I'm not really in the Apple ecosystem, so I might be mistaken). If Apple does add this feature and make a big push next year, I hope it forces Amazon and Google to follow suit.
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I'm sure almost no one uses the cloud to replace local storage, but as a convenience in addition to local storage. I certainly don't. But, sure, go ahead and insult people that don't exist.
I love the convenience of Amazon Music, but I'll be able to come up with an alternative. I have all my media on multiple spinning-rust platters and aluminized plastic. It's not going anywhere.
Cloud anything sucks! (Score:1)
Alternative streamer options (Score:1)
In no particular order...
Plex
Kodi
Emby
MediaPortal
Subsonic
Servetome
Madsonic
iTunes?
OpenFLIXR
Tvmobili
Mediatomb
Live by the "cloud"... (Score:2)
...die by the "cloud".
The "cloud" was always a joke/scam. Just a euphemism for storing stuff on other peoples' servers... something people were doing long before the cutesy word was invented, except now apparently it's morally acceptable to rape^H^H^H^Hmine your data for any informational revenue the place hosting it can find. Then kick you to the curb whenever they feel like it later on down the road after you've reworked your life to be dependent on their services.
Not to mention that being dependent on th
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Ditto, but iPhones don't have SD cards. Have to put stuff in their tiny storages. :(
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So when you were 33 years old you just happened to have Patsy Cline CDs lying around? And your supervisor just happened to have a system loud enough for an entire department to hear it? And the entire department fitted in that room?
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