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Amazon Cloud Drive and Amazon Cloud Player

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Re: Amazon Cloud Drive and Amazon Cloud Player

#141

Post by e03179 »

slackerIII wrote: post #27

If you want a free service to stream your music from your home computer to your work computer/android/iOS device, check out my service: http://www.audiogalaxy.com Since we don't store the music in the cloud, we don't have any size limits (the current winner has about 530,000 files). Obviously this only works if you leave your home computer on, but we've found that isn't a problem for most folks.

How does your service compare to Orb? With Orb, I can stream my DRM'd-to-hell Zune Pass content to my iPhone.

Re: Amazon Cloud Drive and Amazon Cloud Player

#142

Post by podperson »

MatthewPhillips wrote: post #134
tzury wrote: post #132

I suspect this 5GB quote is a "fake", since there is no need to actually "copy" a song to the User's virtual drive, rather add a pointer to a copy already available on their platform, that is, if 1M users are buying a popular song, there is no need to clone this song million times, right? Having said that, since there are smart people working on this platform on amazon, I am sure they don't make a physical clone, whi…

There is no cap on music purchased from Amazon MP3 (going forward). The cap is on uploaded files, since there is no way to link your uploaded copy of Bad Romance with my uploaded copy of Bad Romance and know that they are the same.

Surely there is in fact a way, at least much of the time. In general, I assume encoding a digitized song with a given codec and quality settings is deterministic, so the files have some chance of being identical. Next, if the track were identified using a common process (e.g. CDDB) it might easily be possible to identify them as being identical in origin and then perform some tests to see if they are in fact identical and convert one into a pointer to the other.

Re: Amazon Cloud Drive and Amazon Cloud Player

#143

Post by arohner »

MatthewPhillips wrote: post #134
tzury wrote: post #132

I suspect this 5GB quote is a "fake", since there is no need to actually "copy" a song to the User's virtual drive, rather add a pointer to a copy already available on their platform, that is, if 1M users are buying a popular song, there is no need to clone this song million times, right? Having said that, since there are smart people working on this platform on amazon, I am sure they don't make a physical clone, whi…

There is no cap on music purchased from Amazon MP3 (going forward). The cap is on uploaded files, since there is no way to link your uploaded copy of Bad Romance with my uploaded copy of Bad Romance and know that they are the same.

There is, if the MD5s match.

Re: Amazon Cloud Drive and Amazon Cloud Player

#144

Post by Someone »

tybris wrote: post #104
swombat wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've said it before, I'll say it again: ( http://swombat.com/2011/2/22/predictability-of-closed-platfo... ) > I would argue that only one thing is entirely predictable about closed platforms: they will do whatever is in the business's interest. When building your business on someone else's platform, you should always assume that if it is in the platform owner's interest, they will shut you down tomorrow with no warni…

I don't think that's quite comparable. Contrary to platforms like Google App Engine or iOS, the core infrastructure AWS offers is sufficiently open and commonplace that you wouldn't have such a hard time moving away from them in the unlikely event that they'll throw you out. This is simply a case of a much more classical business dilemma: a big company decides to build a product that competes with your small company.…

The other side of that coin is that, if it is easy to move somewhere else, Amazon does not have that special of a product. If that is the case, how are they going to compete? Both price and quality are options, but even those are forms of lock-in, if they keep customers in-house.

Re: Amazon Cloud Drive and Amazon Cloud Player

#147

Post by gfodor »

unfletch wrote: post #73
ffumarola wrote: post #9

The 20gb free for purchasing an album makes this a pretty clutch deal. They don't compete with dropbox's sync functionality, but they sure do on price and the mp3 cloud player!

In case you missed it in Amazon's terms, the free upgrade is temporary. It expires in a year, at which point you can start paying or be bumped back down to the free level. ...you will be automatically eligible for the 20 GB plan for one year from the date of your MP3 album purchase. Unless you set your account to auto-renew to a paid plan, the 20 GB plan will revert to a free plan one year from the date of your MP3 a…

I doubt this will stick. The reason is because ultimately that means Amazon will be put in a position to delete peoples' files (if they fail to pay for their 20GB that month it reverts.) That could lead to lawsuits etc, probably not worth the chump change they'll save by revertting those plans.

Re: Amazon Cloud Drive and Amazon Cloud Player

#148

Post by roc »

pkulak wrote: post #36

Streaming seems a bit silly when I've got 16 gigs sitting empty on my phone. I just want synching. I'll use Pandora if I want to stream. And then I'm not restricted to just my library.

I'd be very surprised if this isn't step 1 to a whole-phone-data-sync solution. Media, Data, third party app API -- the whole shebang.
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