Amazon's New Cloud Player & Cloud Drive

[oz]

Anyone else here using Amazon's newly released Cloud Drive and/or Cloud Player?

https://www.amazon.com/clouddrive/learnmore

Getting Started: Amazon Cloud Drive and Amazon Cloud Player.

I've never given much thought to being or becoming cloud-oriented but this sounded like a good deal so I bought an album for $2.49 and got the 20GB drive account for one year at no charge just to see how it goes and works out. Not sure if I'll revert back to the free 5GB account at the end of that year, or if I'll keep the 20GB cloud drive. The thing that enticed me most was that music you purchase from them does not consume any of your cloud drive space, even though it is stored there, and the fact that it also works with Android.

I'll report back with more info on this after I've played with it some.

Any experiences or thoughts on these new Amazon offerings from anyone else?

[rajatmendus]

I'm hearing about this for the first time.

[oz]

Streaming seems to work well enough, at least so far, but I've not tried it with any Android devices yet. I'm thinking that the interfaces for both the drive and the player could still use a few improvements, but then it is all new and they are asking for feedback to improve them.

[Cabhan]

There are definitely a few interface problems, and I've had a few performance problems, but I've so far been very happy with it. In particular, I like that Amazon MP3 files are automatically uploaded to it; they used to not store the Amazon MP3 files that you had purchased, so if you deleted the files locally, you had to re-purchase them to get them again.

My main complaint at this point is that you can't upload directly to Cloud Player from Linux, but you can upload to Cloud Drive, so it's not a huge problem.

I never really thought about the fact that this space was kind of unfulfilled, but I'm pretty happy with this particular product .

[oz]

Right... the free storage for all music that you buy from them is a huge plus, especially when they have good prices for their music anyway. A person could easily go for the free 5GB account and if they always bought their music from Amazon, they'd never need more space. One thing I'm curious about is what happens if their servers go down, or get hacked? Wonder if they keep backups so that my music isn't lost?

I've never been a cloud kind of guy but I'm now starting to see how it could have some benefits.

[Cabhan]

I assume (and many others are assuming) that they are using S3 internally to store all of the files, so I would assume that it's all backed up. I don't know what the uptime for S3 is, but since lots of companies use it, I suspect it's pretty reliable .

[DGrier]

I love it, recently I have been having issues with Rhythmbox working with my android phone, every time I plug it in Rhythembox closes and it was starting to get annoying. Then tonight right before I read this thread I discovered Amazon mp3 cloud and I am not a fan of streaming but I do love how I can download it on my phone cause I use my phone as a mp3 player and I can download it onto my pc so I can have my full library in Rhythembox. Problem solved.

[MountainX]

I find the lack of Linux support for Cloud Drive to be appalling! The Linux features are extremely limited to compared to what Amazon makes available to Windows and Mac users. On Linux I'm mostly limited to uploading a single file at a time via a clunky web interface.

Is there a script for Linux that will address this? The closest I have found so far is QTCloudDrive, but I find no documentation for it, so I don't even know if it actually works or what it does.

Anyone have other suggestions? I want to keep my files automatically sync'd between my local computer and Amazon Cloud Drive.

EDIT: we need something like this for Linux:
Mount Your Amazon Cloud Drive Space Like a Network Folder in Windows (find article on LifeHacker - I can't post URLs)

[MASONTX]

I've never been a fan of storing my data, music, or anything else online. In these times of here today and gone tomorrow, the company storing your data may disappear overnight. Anything you store online should be backed up elsewhere.