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Amazon Matches iTunes Match With New 'Audio Upgrade' Feature
New submitter bostonidealist writes "Just after the July 6th 1-year anniversary of its unlimited music storage promotion (and presumably after early subscribers have all renewed their annual subscriptions), Amazon.com has changed the way its Cloud Player and Cloud Drive services work. Starting today, music uploaded to a Cloud Drive will count against its owner's Cloud Drive quota and will not be accessible through Cloud Player. Further, music files previously uploaded to Cloud Player or Cloud Drive are being automatically converted to 256 Kbps audio whenever Amazon 'has the rights to do so' and new audio files uploaded to Cloud Player will automatically be checked against Amazon's music database in iTunes Match-like fashion. One of the appeals of Amazon's Cloud Player service up to this point has been that users could pay a flat fee and store an unlimited number of their own music files (with their own tags, artwork, and audio data intact). Now, Amazon is automatically replacing users' previously uploaded data with its own, without allowing users to opt in/out."
According to the article: "Like iTunes Match, Amazonâ(TM)s Cloud Player keeps copies of songs at 256 kilobytes per second, even if the original version was lower-fidelity."
Who would want 256 kilobyte per second, which turns a normal CD into more than a Gigabyte?
The point of forcibly replacing your music with a good-quality one is so they can massively reduce storage. Now they just need one copy of each song.
Which makes it doubly bizarre they're now counting it against your cloud storage -- it's not even stored in your "piece" -- all that's stored are a few bytes of an ID pointing into their song database.
This is the cloud equivalent of the "?????" step between the "Charge money for storage space" step and the "Profit" step.
Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities. - Voltaire
Another experiment would be to record yourself singing a song and see what Amazon replaces it with.
I tried that, but all it came up with was "The Very Best of Assorted Cat Mating Calls"