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Businesses Music

Amazon's Music Storage Service Will Remove MP3 Files on April 30 (theverge.com) 64

Posted by msmash from the brace-for-impact dept.
Amazon announced last year that it intends to shut down its dedicated cloud music locker. Now, the company has elaborated on its thinking. From a report: In an email to Amazon Music users, the company says uploaded songs will be removed from a user's library on April 30th, 2018. You can however keep any music in the cloud by proactively going to your Music Settings and clicking the "Keep my songs" button. Back in December, Amazon stopped letting users upload new tracks to Music Storage, which holds up to 250 songs for free. The company said at the time that by January 2019, users wouldn't be able to download or stream tracks they've uploaded to Music Storage, so it sounds like you'll still have many months between April and next January to get your music downloaded and onto a different storage platform or hard drive.
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Amazon's Music Storage Service Will Remove MP3 Files on April 30 More

Amazon's Music Storage Service Will Remove MP3 Files on April 30

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  • Cloud storage (Score:5, Insightful)

    by 110010001000 ( 697113 ) on Friday March 30, 2018 @02:20PM (#56354485) Homepage Journal
    Oddly, my $400 Synology server is still serving up my files for over 7 years now. I guess its business model doesn't change and start deleting your stuff.

    • I'm the 1% who actually used Amazon's MP3 upload feature. But it's trivial for me to uninstall Amazon's apps from my phone, tablet and PC and stream my CD/MP3 collection with a low-end home NAS.

      I'm not sure what Amazon is thinking. They have to offer a lot of reasons to keep me on their ad-laden Music app.

      • Re:So easy to walk away (Score:5, Insightful)

        by 110010001000 ( 697113 ) on Friday March 30, 2018 @02:39PM (#56354595) Homepage Journal
        My guess is they are trying to push you to Prime Music streaming.

        • Re:So easy to walk away (Score:4, Interesting)

          by OrangeTide ( 124937 ) on Friday March 30, 2018 @02:47PM (#56354625) Homepage Journal

          That checks out. Because I have some albums that I bought that now won't play on the Android app until I sign up for Prime Streaming. but if I carefully go into the menus and pick Download I can get around the restriction. Maybe it's a bug, but it's a rather convenient way for Amazon to influence us to buy yet another service from them.

        • Which is (sorry) retarded for those of us in more secure environments who want to sync up their MP3 collections before spending 12+ hours in Server-ville.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by Ksevio ( 865461 )
      Well my HD died, but my music stored on the cloud was still there so I guess each to his own
    • I use FreeNAS, but have Plex running on a NUC with an external USB drive that I make internet accessible in a DMZ.

      I'm not wasting my RAIDZ space on FLAAC audio.

      Cost me $150 for a lifetime plex subscription to have offline sync on my phone/tablets.

      Screw the cloud.

      • "I use FreeNAS, but have Plex running on a NUC with an external USB drive that I make internet accessible in a DMZ.

        I'm not wasting my RAIDZ space on FLAAC audio."

        Your acronym generator seems also to be fine.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by tsa ( 15680 )

      Same here, only for a shorter time. These things are marvellous.

  • Subscribe to Amazon Prime Fresh Music Now (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward

    They want people upgrading from the free tier of streaming you get on prime to the more expensive service. Having unlimited storage for your own files gets in the way of that.

    You'll also note that the plex skill wound up as an entirely neutered remote control instead of a way to stream your own files without having to pay for either tier.

  • Just in case anyone is interested you access this through music.amazon.com, click on your name, and then your amazon music settings. It is NOT available through the cloud drive settings. It also says it will only keep 250 songs, which is annoying since I have 312 stored so I'll have to figure out what I have that I might not want available to stream.

  • And yet again... (Score:5, Insightful)

    by roc97007 ( 608802 ) on Friday March 30, 2018 @03:09PM (#56354721) Journal

    ...we are reminded that it's not a good idea to keep stuff you care about in the cloud.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by ffkom ( 3519199 )
      Sure, but given that the now prevalent generation of consumer-zombies does not care about anything, the "cloud" is a perfectly suited thing for them.
      To my initial disbelieve, I met specimens of that kind who actually purchased the very same song multiple times just because they could not be bothered to transfer it from device A to device B, no matter how simple that would have been.

    • And where do normal people put the stuff then? Not us. Most Slashdot users are more than capable of setting up their own personal cloud service on their ultra fast home fibre connections with 40mbit upload capacity. No, normal users. I see a quote above talking about a Synology server, I see talk about not trusting any cloud service, but I see very little talk of practical alternatives.

      Personally I tell the computer newbies to put their stuff in the cloud. Yeah, Amazon may announce that they will remove the

      • Thumb drives? External hard drives? It doesn't have to be NAS. It doesn't take much technical expertise to plug something in and see a new drive icon appear. My mother-in-law can do that much.

        • Yeah store your stuff on thumb drives. You did teach them how to encrypt that stuff right? How about external drives? How many people do you know that are still using the same drive they bought 6 years ago as their only backup. At least it was their only backup until their laptops filled up and they have a copy of the file anyway.

          If I audit your mother-in-law I guarantee I'll find a dataloss case waiting to happen, and your solutions are part of the problem. You have presented someone with a thing but witho

    • ...we are reminded that it's not a good idea to keep stuff you care about in *only one place*.

      FTFY

  • For giving me the heads up yesterday with just a few hours to spare.

  • ..about the "Cloud"

    Local storage is best

    Cloud backup can be useful as part of a multi-level backup strategy, but keeping your one and only copy on the cloud is silly

    Yeah, I know this rant doesn't exactly follow from the article, but the idea is still valid

    • Local storage is best

      For whom? The mum and dad who have all their valuable data on a single non backed up HDD hoping that it is both fireproof and will last forever?

      Local storage is the best for people who know enough about computers to properly manage their data. That makes about 0.01% of the computer users out there.

  • I only have 6,312 options left for music storage.

    I still have a folder on my archive disks from someone who was losing their HDD and I backed up their 13,000+ song music collection ("I would just die if I lost this") because I had the space so they could come get it back after a new disk/OS. That was 8 years ago, not even a single ask about it. I would imagine Amazon and the others are just a macro version of that, petabytes of dusty storage space that is almost never accessed.

  • on microSD cards

    Fortunately modern tablets support 128GB or more

  • I'm a Amazon Unlimited Music subscriber since I travel a lot and consume music. Some folks say I'm a sucker "renting" music, but why pay for all of those tracks I will get bored with? It gets expensive. On a subscription plan, I can listen to most artist's latest album and have no buyer's remorse if it sucks. I do pay for tracks I can't get enough of and download them to my sprawling library at home. That library also has MP3s ripped from CD that are long gone and not available on the streaming plans o

  • That music you actually own on a CD is looking like a good buy now.
  • link [amazon.com]. It's the "Keep My Songs" button in the 3rd paragraph.

  • "Will Remove MP3 Files on April 30"

    So my ogg, flac, opus and m4a files will remain? or does someone think any audio file is automatically an mp3 file?

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