Amazon's Music Storage Service Will Remove MP3 Files on April 30 (theverge.com) 64
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.
Cloud storage (Score:5, Insightful)
So easy to walk away (Score:2)
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)
Re:So easy to walk away (Score:4, Interesting)
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.
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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.
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1. My internet is always on. So that in-house NAS is always available as long as my house has power.
2. At most I would be on the other side of the country. I'm not likely to travel outside of the US and still want to stream over my phone due to the roaming charges anyways.
Streaming MP3s over free hotel WiFi is not a big deal even on the other side of the world, since unidirectional streaming is not latency sensitive.
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Yeah, But there's no Alexa voice control commands to tell Alexa or Sonos to play music from local NAS or from those competing cloud storage services -- It seems like you HAVE to use the music upload service or Spotify or Amazon's Music service, in order to get a song to play by voice command :-(
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Yeah, But there's no Alexa voice control commands to tell Alexa or Sonos to play music from local NAS or from those competing cloud storage services -- It seems like you HAVE to use the music upload service or Spotify or Amazon's Music service, in order to get a song to play by voice command :-(
Luckily for me, this is a frill I have neither become accustomed to, nor desire. I can move my arm a few centimeters to click/tap on a playlist and this is no problem. Plus I really don't like the idea of a corporation with a marketing department having a plausible excuse for recording sound in my home or around my person. Even if they look nice now, privacy policies have this way of changing without notice. The temptation to do so for a bit more money is too much for them to resist, as history has show
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Backups are for whimps :).
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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.
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"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.
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Same here, only for a shorter time. These things are marvellous.
Subscribe to Amazon Prime Fresh Music Now (Score:1)
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.
Location (Score:2)
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.
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Email too if you want.
> yay for the cloud?
Yay for MY cloud.
And yet again... (Score:5, Insightful)
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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.
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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
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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.
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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
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FTFY
Re: And yet again... (Score:2)
Yes, that.
Thanks Amazon (Score:2)
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Yet another reason to be skeptical.. (Score:2)
..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
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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.
What do I do now? (Score:2)
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.
I keep my music (Score:2)
on microSD cards
Fortunately modern tablets support 128GB or more
Maybe a deal breaker for me (Score:2)
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
Should have got the CD (Score:2)
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well those DRM CDs were a pain...
Amazon link to do just that. (Score:2)
just mp3? (Score:2)
"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?