Josh Ong
The "Amazon Cloud Player" app hit the App Store on Tuesday and has already garnered a five-star rating with more than 100 ratings. Though the free iPhone app is listed as being compatible with the iPad, there is currently no official iPad version.
“By bringing Cloud Player to iPhone and iPod touch, we now have the most widely compatible cloud playback solution available, giving our customers the ability to buy once and enjoy their music everywhere," Steve Boom, Amazon's vice president of Digital Music, said in a press release.
The application allows users to stream music from Amazon's Cloud Drive, download tracks for offline use and create and edit playlists. Amazon recommends that users load Amazon Cloud Player on a Mac or PC to upload their music collections "from iTunes or your other folders."
The e-commerce giant launched Cloud Player last March, just months before Apple would preview its own iCloud and iTunes in the Cloud features.
Cloud Player was initially not compatible with iOS, though the music streaming service began unofficially working a few months after launch.
Last November, third-party iOS applications making use of Amazon's Cloud Drive were reportedly removed from the App Store because of legal issues. Record labels had been unhappy with Amazon for releasing Cloud Player without negotiating new licenses.
Christine McKee
Malcolm Owen
Wesley Hilliard
Marko Zivkovic
3 Comments
about time - fantastic!... my girl and i have put our entire collection on this - no care what computer we on and now any device!
I was on an all night press ok from hell and I fired up an old PC they had and we had my music running in a few sec.
How about a Google Drive / Music app, Google?
Glad to see this, Amazon's perceived weakness in comparison to iTunes Match is also their strength. With iTunes Match, if a track is incorrectly matched, there's no way to force an upload meaning you're screwed. iTunes offers no solutions for this problem. Though you have to upload everything with Amazon, you at least know you have the correct versions of each song which can therefore provide a meaningful cloud backup. The Amazon app isn't as polished though, I noticed compilation albums don't group by various artists meaning the artist list will be incredibly long. They really need an app now to play on televisions, if not Apple TV then PS3, Xbox, WDTV, Roku, etc.