In order to ensure its service has the best chance of competing with rival cloud-based music services, especially those that may be coming from Cupertino, Amazon has just introduced an iPad-friendly version of Cloud Player and expanded the music storage capabilities of Cloud Drive.
Although users shouldn’t expect to see a native Cloud Player app appear in the App Store anytime soon, a new web-based player optimised for the iPad can now be accessed through your device’s web browser. This will allow you to listen to all of the music you have stored in your Cloud Drive while you’re on the go.
In addition to this, Amazon has announced unlimited storage space for music for all customers who subscribe to a paid Cloud Drive storage plan — even those on the lowest price plan at $20 per year. While storage for other files remains capped depending on your plan, you can upload as many music files (MP3 and AAC) as you wish.
There’s also a little bit for customers on the free Cloud Drive plan: although you won’t have unlimited storage for all music, tracks purchased directly from Amazon won’t count against your 5GB storage quota.
This move gives Amazon’s cloud services an advantage over rival Google Music, which doesn’t currently offer unlimited storage. However, it is a limited time offer and won’t be around forever. Therefore, if you’ve been meaning to sign up to the service, now would be the best time to do it.
For iOS users then, Amazon’s cloud services look a little more attractive than the upcoming Google Music.
Apple has already announced ‘iTunes in the Cloud‘, but unlike Amazon Cloud Drive and Google Music, the service doesn’t allow users to stream their tracks from the cloud. Instead, the service will sync a user’s entire music library across all of their devices for $24.99 a year, but it will still eat away at your previous local storage.
[via MacRumors]
Killian Bell is a freelance writer based in the U.K. He has an interest in all things tech and also covers Android over at CultofAndroid.com. You can follow him on Twitter via @killianbell.
16 responses to “Amazon Introduces iPad-Friendly Cloud Player, Offers Unlimited Storage”
This is going to get seriously confusing before everything shakes out. Part of it is that the major players still don’t have a strategy completely nailed down. Also, the ISPs are going to start wanting a cut, since cloud based data storage is going to stress the infrastructure.Â
I would check your facts about the whole iTunes thing. Â Because as I recall there is streaming in the iTunes Match program and it is based on their core catalog so you don’t use any storage for matched songs. It’s only stuff that they don’t have like obscure world music etc that you would have to upload to anywhere.Â
Not true. There is no streaming of music. ‘iTunes Match’ only avoids you having to upload your entire catalog to apple.
No, there is no streaming, only syncing. So if you download a song on your Mac, it will automatically be sent to your iPhone as well. But it will continue to be stored locally — not streamed from the cloud.
I tried out the iPad site and it looks nice but there is a serious functionality problem – you can’t start playing an album or playlist and switch away from Safari. If Safari is not the active app, Amazon’s player can’t switch to the next song. So you have to switch back and let the player have control for a few seconds before the music will continue. Basically useless except for single tracks.
No internet connection (at the moment) = no music. Necessary for Pandora, but why would I want this for my owned tracks? I like Apple’s solution: store the whole library in the cloud but instead of streaming everything you play, download it once and it’ll still be there when you’re offline. No more syncing complexity, but I still get the performance of locally stored music. Streaming is a huge step backwards.
C’mom Amazon… you don’t stream books. Why music?
Still doesn’t play more then 1 song if you put your phone or ipad to sleep. Â So annoying, come on Amazon fix it!!!!!!Â
The major players are making a huge mistake.  They should see how many people are buying iPhones and iPads and make an app that works beautifully on the Apple platform rather then locking Apple users out and only developing for Android.