Amazon has unveiled its long rumored media locker. Cloud Drive gives users a way to store a minimum of 5GB of files on the web and access them from any Mac or PC. The company has a unique tie-in with Amazon MP3: any songs bought through the music store are saved to the Cloud Drive and available either for backup or for remote streaming without counting towards the quota.
Accordingly, the company has both a Cloud Player for Web and an updated free version of Amazon MP3 for Android . Both can play music stored on the Player without needing a third-party app or otherwise raw access.
Still Need a Computer
Music uploads are only possible from computers and thus won’t let Android users backup their Amazon MP3 purchases to work truly independently from a computer.
Pricing
US-based Amazon users can get 5GB of space for free but get an incentive to upgrade early. Anyone who buys an Amazon MP3 album in 2011 will automatically be upgraded to 20GB of space for the year from the sale. The extra capacity would otherwise cost $20 per year. Tiers exist to provide 50GB, 100GB, 200GB, 500GB and 1TB, all of which cost $1 per year for every gigabyte of storage. Using the Cloud Player on the web needs Chrome, Firefox 3.5, Internet Explorer 8, or Safari; Amazon MP3 needs at least Android 1.6.
