Amazon’s Cloud Player and Cloud Drive used to be a handy 5GB free online backup service with the ability to play the music you upload (or buy) on any one of a number of electronic devices, including your smartphone, naturally.
Now, however, we receive this email from Amazon announcing “improvements” in Cloud Player:
Cloud Player and Cloud Drive are now separate services. Music you previously imported into Cloud Drive will remain in Cloud Drive at its original audio quality, and won’t count toward your Cloud Drive storage limit. Music you import to Cloud Drive in the future will no longer be available in Cloud Player.
Free Cloud Player accounts are now limited to 250 imported songs. Customers who are over that limit receive a 30-day free upgrade to Cloud Player Premium to test out our new features. Once you log in, you have 30 days to enjoy your music, everywhere. If you’d like to keep using Cloud Player for free, remove songs from your ‘Imported’ playlist until your library is below the 250 song limit before the 30 days are up. At the end of the 30-day free upgrade, if you have more than 250 imported songs in Cloud Player, you will not be able to play your previously imported music in Cloud Player – but you can start fresh and re-import up to 250 songs. Music you imported before July 31st will remain stored in Cloud Drive.
Hmmm. $24.99 per year and I don’t even understand exactly what I get for that.
Music they “match” is a higher quality, sure.
And I can re-upload 250 songs, convenient.
Oh, well, sometimes “free is as free does”. It was nice while it lasted.
If you are really into online backup, syncing with mobile devices, and having what you want the way you want it, maybe you should take a look at SugarSync.
With SugarSync you will be much happier with both the online backup portion of the service and the ability to play your music – which is backed up to the cloud – on any device at the quality you expect.