Should you put your music on Amazon’s cloud?
What this system does is ask you to make another decision about where your music is going to be. Vinyl albums and cassettes have given way to CDs, which have given way to digital files on a hard drive for many of us. Are you willing to make this next leap and put all your music on Amazon’s servers with the condition that they’ll let you listen to it whenever you please?
We break down some key facts to know about Amazon’s system with Dan Ackerman of CNET.com.
First of all, you may run across some difficulty uploading your music on to Amazon’s servers. It doesn’t play so nicely with iTunes songs that have the more restrictive DRM (digital rights management) conditions in place. The Amazon tool should tell you which songs it’s unable to load and why. Once the music is loaded, you’ll be able to play it back on a Mac or PC using Firefox, Chrome, Safari or Internet Explorer browsers, though you’ll fare much better with the newer models of browsers over the older ones. Playing the music on your Android-enabled phone or tablet should be pretty easy but Amazon doesn’t officially support Apple products, so iPhones or iPads will be tougher (though not impossible).
Dan Ackerman says that while the free 5gb of space Amazon offers should hold hundreds of songs, he was able to upgrade to 20gb by buying one $5 album off Amazon.
Also in this program, a new app called Last Night Never Happened erases all your drunken Facebook messages and tweets. Can’t cure your hangover though, Drinky.
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