Amazon announces unlimited MP3 storage with any Cloud Drive plan

I worked at Amazon for a while as an intern, but I didn't see how a ton of the external facing stuff worked like this. So in some ways, this is mostly speculation.

I notice one big thing about image-based announcements: I'd rarely hear about the publicly first, and I'd definitely not hear about them internally in an official way. Leak-proofing things.

I suspect the reason for images is because it's simply harder for PR/management types to make a decent looking webpage that works in multiple browsers. It's way faster to export an image from whatever software they use to generate it.

And I suspect it avoids deployment headaches.

I'm not an expert, but I've been doing a little research on audio file compression to cut down on Amazon S3 charges for a personal site I have up that suddenly got a fair amount of traffic. The way I understand it, ogg vorbis files actually compress better than mp3s, so they're better on a quality/size ratio. A 3MB ogg file will generally sound better than a 3MB mp3 file.

I think the reason Amazon might not be supporting them is that not all browsers can play them natively — specifically, Safari needs a plug-in to play them. So, for my site, which is using jPlayer, I have to compress all the files as .oga and .mp3, then set up the mp3s as a fallback so Safari will stream them.

Wow, Amazon continues to amaze. I'd really love an iPhone app, though. This is kind of useless for me until they release one (I prefer iTunes to listening to music on my laptop, it's faster and has a nicer interface.)

Looks like they have standardized on a 475 pixel width headline image for each section. In this case, it has lots of text, but usually it has product photos emphasized with headline text.

Well, if I were to do it, I'd probably implement a few checks.

I would check to make sure that the ID3 information was no more than, say, 10% of the total file size. (I'd probably adjust the percentage based on actually inspecting a large collection of files; say, the ones available for download through Amazon.)

I'd probably make sure that the resulting sound output had a regular pattern - a steady beat, etc - and flag for review anything that wasn't, probably with a rating of how likely it is for the file to not be an mp3.

And obviously, scan the file to make sure that it doesn't obviously contain an archive, images, ASCII text that falls within the KJV bible distribution, and check for other formats; someone renaming stolen_e_book.pdf into music.mp3 would probably be pretty obvious.