Guide: 10 Amazon Cloud Player Tips & Tricks

Guide: 10 Amazon Cloud Player Tips & Tricks
April 6, 2011

If you think that you need access to yet another cloud storage solution like you need another hole in your head, let us tell you: You need another hole in your head. Making it’s debut last week, Amazon Cloud Drive is the latest service offering to take care of your cloud-based storage needs. Giving all users five GBs of free storage space very agreeable music streaming capabilities, Amazon’s Cloud Drive and Cloud Player services may be the cloud computing solution you’ve been waiting for. To help get your Amazon cloud storage empire off on the right foot, we’ve put together a collection of ten of the best tips and tricks we’ve uncovered for the fledgling service.

Snag additional storage on the cheap

Amazon is offering up 20 GB of additional cloud storage for free to anyone that purchases an album from Amazon MP3. Given Amazon MP3’s wide selection of artists and reasonable pricing, you’d be nuts not to jump at the chance for those extra gigabytes. It’s worth noting that any music you purchase from Amazon MP3 will automatically be made available via Cloud Player, but doesn’t detract from your total amount of storage space. Nice!

Access Your Music on the Go

For those of you just tuning in, aside from offering reasonably priced cloud storage solution, Amazon Cloud Drive is also a brilliant way to stream your music at the low, low cost of free. Just upload the tracks you want to listen to, navigate to your Cloud Player, or access it via Amazon’s free Cloud Player app for Android, BlackBerry or Web OS and you’ll be picking tunes out of the air in no time. IOS device users? Sorry. For the time being, you’re out of luck unless you do this…

Play MP3 files stored in your Amazon Cloud Account on your IOS Device

It’s a little rough and tumble but it can be done. Using your iOS device’s Safari browser, navigate to your Cloud Drive interface. Open up the music folder, and select the audio file you want to hear. Now, click the Download button. The the file will be streamed from your Amazon Cloud account to your iOS device and played via Quicktime.  Sadly you'll only be able to play one tune at a time using this method, but it's better than nothing, right?

Amazon Cloud Player’s MP3 Uploader: Use it.

Sure you could use your Amazon Cloud Drive’s file upload utility to get your computer-side MP3 files online, but the company offers a far more eloquent solution. Steer your Browser over to your Cloud Player page and upload your files from there. You’ll be presented with the option to download an application that will locate your iTunes or Windows Media Player libraries, tell you which files can be uploaded, how much space they’ll take up and how long before the transfer process is complete. The application will even point out which of your audio files aren’t compatible with Amazon Cloud Player. Now that’s service.

Map Keyboard Shortcuts

At the time that this story was written, Amazon Cloud Player offered no keyboard shortcuts. Fortunately, If you’re a Firefox or Chrome user, KeyMazony does. Providing you with essentials such as volume control, track selection play and pause, KeyMazony should keep you going until if and when Amazon decides to provide Cloud Player users with a desktop client. The extension can be found here for Chrome and here if you’re using Firefox.

Backup Your Backups, Because You Never Know...

You can never have too many backups of your files. Even if you’re already using a service like Dropbox, Sugarsync or Box.net, it never hurts to have a tertiary backup of your most valuable data. At this time, Amazon Cloud drive doesn’t have the slick automatic sync services of competitors like Dropbox, it does offer 5GB of free storage—that’s enough space to back up all of the files from that free Dropbox account you’ve been rocking for the past few years two times over. Trust us, when you suffer a major crash, you’ll be glad you took the time to set up an additional recovery solution.

Be Master of Your Domain

Amazon Cloud Drive comes with four default folders: Documents, Music, Pictures and Video. That said, Amazon makes creating, moving and deleting around new folders a cinch as well. As your online storage kingdom grows (and it will), it’s best to try and maintain some level of organization. After all, the only thing harder to find than a missing file on your PC is a missing file lost somewhere in the clouds.

Divide and Conquer

If you’re anything like we are, you’ve got a lot invested in your cloud service of choice: Application preferences, documents for work, photos and even a few movies. If your primary cloud account is starting to feel a little crowded,  consider moving large, infrequently accessed files over to your Amazon Cloud Account. Doing so will allow you to continue to rock your primary account in the manner to which you’ve become accustomed without being forced to pay any extra for additional storage space.

Read the fine print

While 5 GBs of free online storage sounds great, Amazon has stung their customers in the past with other virtual offerings. Remember a while back when they removed content from Kindle eBook readers without any prior warning or consent? Well, in reading over the legalese for Amazon Cloud Drive, we stumbled across this jewel of a clause: 

“Our Right to Access Your Files. You give us the right to access, retain, use and disclose your account information and Your Files: to provide you with technical support and address technical issues; to investigate compliance with the terms of this Agreement, enforce the terms of this Agreement and protect the Service and its users from fraud or security threats; or as we determine is necessary to provide the Service or comply with applicable law.”

Yeah. That was our reaction too. It goes without saying that you should be careful what you stash in your Cloud Drive, but we’re saying it anyway. BE CAREFUL OF WHAT YOU STASH IN YOUR CLOUD DRIVE.

Be Patient

While Amazon Cloud Drive may not offer the native support for iOS devices or application integration that well seasoned cloud services such as Dropbox do, we see a lot of promise here. Already offering up one of the best online music streaming services around from the get-go, we’ve got a feeling that Amazon has a few more tricks geared towards taking on Apple and Google’s online empires up their digital sleeve. As time wears on, there’s little doubt that added features and application support will make Amazon Cloud Drive a force to be reckoned with.

Like Cloud Player Blog on Facebook at: http://www.facebook.com/pages/Cloud-Player-Blog/109872845761653 

Follow Cloud Player Blog on Twitter at: http://twitter.com/#!/CloudPlayers 

How to Use Amazon Cloud Player for Android

How to Use Amazon Cloud Player for Android

Watch Video:  How to Use Amazon Cloud Player for Android

Amazon's new service lets you store your music in the cloud. Sharon Vaknin shows you how to stream and download your tunes on your Android device.

Like Cloud Player Blog on Facebook at: http://www.facebook.com/pages/Cloud-Player-Blog/109872845761653 

Follow Cloud Player Blog on Twitter at: http://twitter.com/#!/CloudPlayers 

What Amazon Cloud Player and Cloud Drive can do for YOU!

What Amazon Cloud Player and Cloud Drive can do for YOU!

Watch Video: A quick and easy explanation of what Amazon Cloud Player and Cloud Drive can do for YOU!
Like Cloud Player Blog on Facebook at: http://www.facebook.com/pages/Cloud-Player-Blog/109872845761653 

Follow Cloud Player Blog on Twitter at: http://twitter.com/#!/CloudPlayers 

How to Use Amazon Cloud Player With iOS Devices

How to Use Amazon Cloud Player With iOS Devices
by Christina Warren


How do I use Amazon Cloud Player with iOS Devices?

Want to access Amazon’s new Cloud Player from your iOS device? We’ve found a serviceable, if hackneyed, solution.
Amazon launched its Cloud Player and Cloud Drive services Tuesday, offering users a way to access their music files from a web browser anywhere. Amazon also released an official Android App for Cloud Player that lets Android fans listen to their tunes on the go. What about iOS users? Well, it would appear at first blush as if owners of the iPhone, iPod touch or iPad are out of luck — the Cloud Player website simply doesn’t want to work with Mobile Safari.
After assessing the situation a bit, it’s clear that this is a limitation not born out of technical necessity (read: This isn’t because of Flash) and is either a simple oversight or an intentional decision to block iOS devices.
Users who attempt to access amazon.com/cloudplayer in iOS are greeted with a message that the browser is not supported and they should “try Internet Explorer.” Ignoring the message will serve users the standard Cloud Player interface, but pressing the play button on any track will lead, well, nowhere.
Reports from Android owners indicate that they can access the website without a problem, so the issue must be with the user agent string that the website is detecting from the web browser. As far as we can tell, it appears as if Amazon either doesn’t support or is blocking Mobile Safari from direct player control.

The Workaround: Mobile Safari Method

First off, we’ll warn you, while this method certainly works, it isn’t the most streamlined solution. The workaround is to click on a song name and then select “Download” from the drop-down menu. This will force Mobile Safari to open the file. If you have apps like GoodReader, Filer, or iUnarchive installed, you may be able to choose to open the file in those apps.

More recent tests indicate that what will likely happen is that the music file will play back in its own browser window. The file will play like any other QuickTime file, meaning you can pause, scrub forward or backward and adjust the volume. This also means you can listen to the song while in other apps.

This method works pretty well, however, the reality is that you need to do this for every song you want to hear. That makes listening to multiple tracks or shorter songs problematic.

Alternative Two: iCab to the Rescue

The Mobile Safari workaround works now, however, it’s possible that Amazon could change the way it serves files and downloads to iOS devices. If that happens, another option exists.
The fantastic alternative browser iCab Mobile [iTunes link] offers a ton of additional features that make the typical iPhone or iPad browsing experience even better. These features include saving websites to Dropbox, adding bookmarks to Pinboard, Readability or Instapaper and saving sites or portions of text to Evernote. For $1.99, the app is value packed.

One of the standout features of iCab Mobile is the ability to change the browser User Agent. In other words, this lets the website think that you are visiting from a browser other than Mobile Safari.
Changing the Browser ID to “Safari 5 (Mac)” will allow users to download music using the Mobile Safari method, even if Amazon does change how it serves downloaded files.

This Is Not a Technical Problem

The lack of iOS support for the Amazon Cloud Player website is not a technical problem. Music “downloaded” from the site works just fine in Mobile Safari on the iPhone and iPad. There is no conceivable reason that streaming HTML5 audio tags could not be used to provide playback in the browser or in a web app.
The rationale behind the decision not to support iOS is unclear, and we’re not going to make assumptions as to Amazon or Apple’s intentions in the matter. Understanding that the lack of support is not technical, however, may open up some additional solutions for enterprising web developers.
In the interim, at least iOS users can play a song here or there in a jam.

Like Cloud Player Blog on Facebook at: http://www.facebook.com/pages/Cloud-Player-Blog/109872845761653 

Follow Cloud Player Blog on Twitter at: http://twitter.com/#!/CloudPlayers 

What Amazon's Cloud Player Means for Us

What Amazon's Cloud Player Means for Us

Your Music stored on the cloud, and streamed anywhere.

With the launch of Cloud Drive and Cloud Player, Amazon has jumped the gun and pulled attention away from its rivals Google and Apple.

The details of the Cloud Drive service are a dream come true to a lot of geeks: 5GB of storage for free, a great starting point and sufficient for a handful of albums worth of music.

If you want another 20GB, all you have to do is buy an album in MP3 format from Amazon. The album itself won't eat up any of your storage allocation, but simply purchasing it gets you the 20GB upgrade for a year.
Want more space? Sure, just buy it. Prices are reasonable, and very easy to remember. Want 50GB? That's 50 bucks per year. 100GB is $100.
What's clever about Amazon's solution is its likely appeal to a wide variety of customers. It's great if you like to own your music, because you still do. It's great if you prefer to stream music, because you still can.
Nothing's really changed, except the place where the music files are kept. They used to be on your computer's hard disk. Now they're in the cloud. As long as you can still listen to them, who cares where they are?

Amazon has reached this point by cleverly investing in its online storage technologies in recent years. It began by innovating with services like S3, a cloud-based storage system for web developers. Now that S3 is successful (and dependable), Amazon's taken the next obvious step: open the same network up to consumers, and make it very easy to use.

What's more, Cloud Drive is aptly named. It's not just for music. You can put any files you like up there. It's a drive, in the cloud.
Amazon's launch means we'll see Apple and Google unveiling their rival services as soon as they can complete them. Other companies will follow. In a year from now, we'll be swimming in cloud drive services.
The result? The ever-hastening death of the hard disk. You just won't need one any more. New computers will come with solid state drives - still with many gigabytes of storage space, and each generation cheaper than the one before - but most people will store most stuff in cloud services. Even backup drives will fade away, because it will be just as effective to copy your data between clouds, and be sure there are multiple copies of it.
Another obvious step is yet to come: a multi-purpose Amazon tablet that combines the sleek stylings of the Kindle with the huge storage capacity of Cloud Drive.

Amazon boss Jeff Bezos has pulled off something remarkable. He's stolen Apple's thunder, and, ahem, kindled a new round of speculation among tech pundits everywhere: could an online retailer beat the computer hardware industry to a tablet device that can really give the iPad some serious competition?

Like Cloud Player Blog on Facebook at: http://www.facebook.com/pages/Cloud-Player-Blog/109872845761653 

Follow Cloud Player Blog on Twitter at: http://twitter.com/#!/CloudPlayers 

Cloud Player and Cloud Drive: Music Storage, Player, and much more from Amazon

Cloud Player and Cloud Drive: Music Storage, Player, and much more from Amazon

Amazon, as you may have heard, announced a new service called Cloud Drive. The service gives you a free 5GB of online storage for your music, then lets you stream your songs on-demand from the Web or any Android device.
Cloud Player couldn't be simpler: You use Amazon's PC-based tool to find all the music on your computer and dump it onto Amazon's servers. You install Amazon's Cloud Player app onto your Android phone and, if you have one, your Android tablet, too. Then, wherever you are -- whatever device you're using -- you can pull up your tunes and play 'em as if they were right there with you.


Like Cloud Player Blog on Facebook at: http://www.facebook.com/pages/Cloud-Player-Blog/109872845761653 

Follow Cloud Player Blog on Twitter at: http://twitter.com/#!/CloudPlayers