Amazon Cloud Drive and Amazon Cloud Player • Hacker News Board

Re: Amazon Cloud Drive and Amazon Cloud Player

#151

Post by ralphc » Tue, Mar 29, 2011, 3:26 PM UTC

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.

Just downloaded it. Is there or can there be an option to keep the traffic inside my LAN, on the home side of my router? Seems a waste of my ISP bandwidth to stream from one room in my house to another.

Re: Amazon Cloud Drive and Amazon Cloud Player

#152

Post by roc » Tue, Mar 29, 2011, 3:30 PM UTC

jkincaid wrote: post #12

I think Amazon is trying to become the backbone for the 'alternative' set of Android core apps that will inevitably be developed. These apps will appeal to any carrier/OEM that wants to stop licensing from Google, or from companies like Amazon and Facebook who may launch their own devices with splintered versions of Android. My guess is that Amazon will own content delivery for these devices (books, movies, TV, music…

I think Amazon is going to be more tight with their platform than even Microsoft. (e.g. Carriers would not even be in the OS update path)

While many of the pieces will be available to any android device, I don't think carriers/OEMs are likely to partner too tightly with a company that aims to release its own first-party hardware.

Re: Amazon Cloud Drive and Amazon Cloud Player

#153

Post by kwis » Tue, Mar 29, 2011, 3:36 PM UTC

jasonkester wrote: post #89

This is actually a little bit worrying as an entrepreneur building things on top of Amazon's Web Services. Amazon has always made a point of not building services on top of its Cloud offerings that directly compete with its users. Cloud Drive sets a precedent for them as the first time they've gone against that principle. There are lots of "low hanging fruit" companies that were built on the understanding that Amazon…

> Amazon has always made a point of not building services on top of its Cloud offerings that directly compete with its users.

This doesn't strike me as true.

Amazon CloudWatch versus CloudKick Amazon SimpleEmailService versus SendGrid Amazon RDS versus FantomDB

Frankly, looking at AWS's evolution, it seems that one of their favorite methods of innovation is to watch for startups that are servicing a lot of AWS companies, then creating their own version of that product.

Re: Amazon Cloud Drive and Amazon Cloud Player

#154

Post by mone » Tue, Mar 29, 2011, 3:42 PM UTC

Am I missing something or is Amazon (Cloud Drive) not giving the ability to import songs purchased from Amazon prior to this date??

Re: Amazon Cloud Drive and Amazon Cloud Player

#155

Post by ditojim » Tue, Mar 29, 2011, 3:49 PM UTC

marklabedz wrote: post #146

ditojim wrote: post #80

can you export from their cloud drive?

Yes - they provide download capability, however it's at the individual file level only right now.

hopefully they add the ability to bulk export. otherwise, you are semi-locked into this cloud music solution. what happens when a better/cheaper service comes out and you need to move your music?

Re: Amazon Cloud Drive and Amazon Cloud Player

#156

Post by IgorPartola » Tue, Mar 29, 2011, 4:16 PM UTC

And yet another service that does not support Ubuntu... Ubuntu One just might get my money after all.

Re: Amazon Cloud Drive and Amazon Cloud Player

#157

Post by lftl » Tue, Mar 29, 2011, 4:17 PM UTC

gfodor wrote: post #147

unfletch wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Maybe they'll just render some random portion of the files inaccessible unless you pay up? Or just make your account read-only until you clear out enough of the files. Plenty of ways to handle it without wholesale deletion.

Re: Amazon Cloud Drive and Amazon Cloud Player

#158

Post by unfletch » Tue, Mar 29, 2011, 5:14 PM UTC

trotsky wrote: post #121

unfletch wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It actually looks like they could make the web-based UI work in Mobile Safari without too much work. (Easy for me to say.) The UI renders perfectly already. As far as I can tell, playback is the only thing that doesn't work. (But if you "download" a track it'll open in the built-in quicktime player and start playing.) Despite the Flash requirement for uploading, they're already doing non-Flash playback. I don't have…

In a recent article about html5 audio there was a lot of talk about how safari intentionally didn't support automatic audio playback (vs. say chrome and chrome lite). I'm guessing that this would mean you'd have to click a button each time the song changed in your playlist - this would probably suck enough that it explains why they didn't launch with mobile safari support.

Damn, you're right. I'd played around with Cloud Player a bit last night in Safari/Mac, but I guess I never let it play two songs in a row. I just tried to play an album and it stopped after the first song.

Re: Amazon Cloud Drive and Amazon Cloud Player

#159

Post by tzury » Tue, Mar 29, 2011, 5:32 PM UTC

podperson wrote: post #142

MatthewPhillips wrote: post #134

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 identica…

hash is the right (and only) way to do this.

Re: Amazon Cloud Drive and Amazon Cloud Player

#160

Post by technomancy » Tue, Mar 29, 2011, 5:35 PM UTC

JabavuAdams wrote: post #123

Is using the term "cloud" a branding / marketing mistake? The cloud is generic and multi-vendor. It's a utility. This angle makes sense when talking to developers. OTOH, I could see a lot of users being confused because they put stuff "in the cloud", but they can't get it back (from another vendor i.e. different cloud).

> The cloud is generic and multi-vendor. It's a utility. This angle makes sense when talking to developers.

I just set my dad up with SFTP on a dreamhost account, and he keeps calling it his "cloud storage" account. I think beyond the developer world it's starting to just mean "I don't have to back it up, and I can reach it from anywhere."