Amazon has made its triumphant entry into the music streaming world with Amazon Cloud Player. Rather than stream a library of predetermined music (e.g. Pandora, Spotify), Cloud Player lets you upload your existing music library and stream it from any computer or Android device.
For the last 30 minutes, I’ve been testing out Cloud Player. While it’s impossible to get the full experience in half an hour (mostly because Amazon estimates it will be another 12 hours before my first 1,262 songs are uploaded), I’ve had enough time to play with it to write a preliminary evaluation of Amazon’s new streaming music service.
Here are some of my initial thoughts about Amazon Cloud Player and its companion Android app:
- Uploading: When you first install Cloud Drive on your computer, it searches your entire hard drive for your music and your playlists. While this takes a while (10 minutes), once the process is complet e, it makes uploading songs a snap. It pulled my iTunes playlists and let me choose which ones I wanted to upload, a very welcomed feature.
- Usability: The web-based cloud player is really intuitive. The layout makes it easy to select songs, search your music archives and organize your music. The player itself is quick to load, responsive, and even lets you skip around to different points in your music, something not possible with most of the streaming music players on the market today.
- Music Quality: While I’m no audiophile, I really can’t tell any difference between Cloud Player and a streaming service like Pandora. Playing music from your hard drive is going to give you a better acoustic experience, but the vast majority of consumers won’t be able to tell the difference.
- Features: Cloud Player doesn’t ha ve a lot of frills, but...
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