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Amazon Music Ending Cloud MP3 Storage, Streaming Option (billboard.com)
Amazon is planning to retire its Music storage subscription service, the plan that enabled Amazon customers to upload their own music to the company's servers. From a report: Amazon Music Storage subscription plans, which let users upload music from their Mac or PC and stream them alongside the in-app on-demand and radio options, will be accepted until Jan. 15, 2018. Then, the service will run until January 2019, when it will be removed entirely. As of Monday this week, free plans -- which allow for 250 songs to be stored in the cloud -- are no longer able to upload new music to their MP3 locker.
Why is Cloud based servers so bad for people..... This is the reason why. The shut up shop quickly
Wait until everyone buys their Echo for Christmas - and then tell them they can't use it with their music post-purchase. I think that's called bait and switch.
Then you can sell them on your music subscription.
Backup your data to the cloud they said, all your data will be safe they said... /deleted
Yes, Google offers the exact same service.
You could technically run Plex on a VPS, but you would be better served with something like MPD for music only.
Use Plex with a Synology or QNAP unit; it's probably your best bet and you can RAID1 your drives to mitigate the possibility of data loss.
If your home internet goes down regularly, that's a different conversation. If that level of reliability is your concern, you can probably do what you need with a VPS or EC2 instance and host it in the cloud, though you'll be paying monthly for the privilege.
Personally, I'd definitely implore you to take it into your own hands. Amazon was far from the first company to attempt to do this, but if even Amazon can't make it run profitably, alternatives are likely to suffer the same fate as time progresses.
I have my music uploaded to Google Play, has worked well for me.
I also have a NAS at my house with everything on it, which both lets me stream at home without using bandwidth getting it from the cloud. It also means if Google pulls an Amazon here, I still have everything backed up (both on the NAS and my backups of the NAS).
iTunes Match is still around and if the songs are recognized (about 2/3rds) adds the benefit of upgrading those old 128kbit MP3s to 256kbit AACs by erasing the original copy and then downloading the "matched" copy.
iTunes exists on all major platforms but iTunes is far from the best music player...
Democracy is a sheep and two wolves deciding what to have for lunch. Freedom is a well armed sheep contesting the issue
Amazon, Google, etc. They all launch a service, get people to use it, but not enough people, and then pull the plug.
I have Apple Cloud, whatever its called, for music storage, myself. And it's great, I can stream or pull down my music anywhere I go. But I still need to keep it on my computer (don't save any space), out of fear that they might pull the plug one day. Or just have a server crash.
These companies shouldn't just arbitrarily end services like these. If they have a lot of users, at least put the service up for bids from other developers or companies to take it over.
I just tried to do this exact thing on Monday. Try as I might, I couldn't get the songs to upload. All the web-based tutorials showed upload icons on the Amazon Music app, but it simply wasn't there on my system. Even Amazon's help pages still said it should work.
I have an Echo, and I just wanted to add a few CDs to it so that we could listen to them. The 250-song limit was already extremely restrictive.
What I really want is the ability to stream from my own server. This is a feature that Apple is likely to push, since I believe they've always supported in-house iTunes servers (I'm not really in the Apple ecosystem, so I might be mistaken). If Apple does add this feature and make a big push next year, I hope it forces Amazon and Google to follow suit.
Google has similar, but their app is a lot clunkier trying to upload a music library compared to Amazon's.
This is a service that I really liked and actively used. The ability to have one repository for music on one computer, then download and have it on any device, Android or iOS, Windows, or Mac, was quite nice.
Guess I get to choose between Google or Plex now.
Because it's nice to be able to access your collection from your car, work machine, phone, and other connected devices?
I would never put my content *only* in the cloud, but a copy? Why not?
I've been using iTunes Match for the past few years and have been satisfied. It does what you want it to do. I'm running Apple hardware (iMac, MacBook, iPhone) so I don't know how well it works on other platforms.
I live ze unknown. I love ze unknown. I am ze unknown.
Because I honestly don't get it. I mean don't you guys have smartphones? I just keep all my tunes on a MicroSD in my smartphone and thanks to bluetooth I have no problem playing them anywhere be it at home or on the road and it doesn't cost me a dime or cause me to give my tunes to some third party to snoop and delete at their whim.
Call me old fashioned but I'll take storage I control over some corp any day of the week!
ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.