Amazon Cloud Drive Stores 5 GB of Your Stuff Online and Streams Your Music

[feather]

Amazon's made a big leap into the cloud storage space, giving anyone with an Amazon account access to 5 GB of free online space for their files, along with a "Cloud Player" for the web and Android that streams your uploaded music right back to you. Also, buy just one Amazon MP3 album, and you upgrade to 20 GB.

You can buy additional storage from Amazon cheaply, at $20 for a year's worth of 20 GB access, $50 for 50 GB, and up to $1,000 per terabyte. Amazon lacks the universal desktop and mobile access of its (new) competitor Dropbox, and right now their web-based Cloud Storage client is a bit rough around the edges—you can't download more than one file at a time, for example. But 20 GB for the price of one album you were going to buy anyways is quite a nice price, and your music purchases are now stored online automatically. If you're rocking an Android phone, you can stream your music from Amazon's updated MP3 app, too, along with through a standard desktop/laptop browser. Apple device support is conspicuously absent, and it's not a Flash-required issue—we'll presumably see some an iOS offering soon.

Amazon's Cloud Drive is free to sign up for, and requires an Amazon account. The updated Amazon MP3 app for Amazon is only available through the Amazon Appstore, which you'll have to sign up for and download.

http://lifehacker.com/#!5786686/amazon-cloud-drive-stores-5-gb-of-your-stuff-online-and-streams-your-music-back-to-you


Sounds cool.

[dusk]

Re: Amazon Cloud Drive Stores 5 GB of Your Stuff Online and Streams Your Music

Very nice, currently I love Drop Box... but free online storage is always a bonus... Lets see where Amazon takes this in a year. They certainty have the means to be number 1.

[res0nat0r]

Re: Amazon Cloud Drive Stores 5 GB of Your Stuff Online and Streams Your Music

I just was going to post this too. I just signed up for it and uploaded some mp3's it is pretty nice. Streams right from the browser. I also updated my Amazon mp3 Android app and it will let you stream from your account or download right to your device. Nice. This is a good way to get additional mp3 sales from their website. Also 5GB is nice to have for a free account. I love dropbox and use it everywhere still and this is a good supplement.

[demonAfro]

Re: Amazon Cloud Drive Stores 5 GB of Your Stuff Online and Streams Your Music

I've been using SugarSync for a while (see signature ) which gives you 5GB for free. The reason I went with that rather than dropbox is because you can do selective syncing of any folders on different devices, which didn't seem to be possible in dropbox when I wanted it.

TBH the music streaming form Amazon doesn't interest me, but the pricing for storage is very nice

[res0nat0r]

Re: Amazon Cloud Drive Stores 5 GB of Your Stuff Online and Streams Your Music

I haven't head of sugarsync until now, but Dropbox did add selective directory syncing support a few months back with their latest stable release.

[feather]

Re: Amazon Cloud Drive Stores 5 GB of Your Stuff Online and Streams Your Music

I've used Dropbox, Sugarsync, and now using Spideroak. Spideroak gives you 2 GB.

I only switched to Spideroak because Dropbox and Sugarsync are banned in China.

Is the streaming from Amazon to the Android app smooth?

[res0nat0r]

Re: Amazon Cloud Drive Stores 5 GB of Your Stuff Online and Streams Your Music

^It says you should use 4G or wifi if you want to stream, I just tried it thru the wifi briefly and it worked just fine. There isn't 4G in my area and I haven't tried it on 3G. If there was anything I'd want to listen to I'd just download it to my phone via the download option before I went on a drive etc anyway.

[feather]

Re: Amazon Cloud Drive Stores 5 GB of Your Stuff Online and Streams Your Music

Well yeah downloading to the phone is the way now, but there's a lot of talk about moving music to the cloud, everyone from Apple to Google and now Amazon, seems to be in the space ... so I'm curious how the Amazon service works on the mobile. I guess it makes more sense to stream over 4G ...

[tiddles]

Re: Amazon Cloud Drive Stores 5 GB of Your Stuff Online and Streams Your Music

I love amazon's S3. I run a bunch of videos from there and it's sooooooooooooo cheap

[res0nat0r]

Re: Amazon Cloud Drive Stores 5 GB of Your Stuff Online and Streams Your Music

All of Amazons AWS services really are amazing. I get to use their computing cloud a bit at work and play around with spinning up instances and storage etc, it is awesome.

Also you know S3 has a slightly lower tier of storage that is bit cheaper right? You might want to move to that just to save a bit of $$.

[dusk]

Re: Amazon Cloud Drive Stores 5 GB of Your Stuff Online and Streams Your Music

I'll take every bit of free online space that I can get....lol

So yup, I've got Amazon, dropbox and sugarsync ... the latter having an advantage at the moment because of the 5gb space and iphone app as well.

And in comes mSpot... they've just upped their storage to 5GB.... looks like there is some pretty healthy competition right now in cloud storage

http://www.mspot.com/

Insert from LH - the stream-your-own-music service that covers Windows, Mac, Android, and iOS, has raised the online storage for its free accounts to 5 GB. It is, of course, a challenge to Amazon's Cloud Drive/Cloud Player debut, but mSpot does have more developed apps, both in uploading and mobile streaming, than Amazon at the moment.

[res0nat0r]

Re: Amazon Cloud Drive Stores 5 GB of Your Stuff Online and Streams Your Music

Anyone know if there is a CLI interface to CloudDrive? That would be wicked if I could upload files to it from the command line, like normal S3 storage, since this is based off of it it anyway.