Amazon Cloud Drive streams in

Online music locker announced

Amazon has announced a trio of new cloud-based platforms that all fall under its digital locker service - Amazon Cloud.

First up is the actual locker itself, the Amazon Cloud Drive, which allows you to store not only music (MP3 and AAC), but videos, photos and documents as well.

You'll get 5GB of storage for free, and a single Amazon MP3 album purchase bumps this up to 20GB. Tracks purchased direct from Amazon's digital music store do not count towards your allowance, and additional storage can be bought from $20 per year. Everything is nice and secure, courtesy of Amazon's S3 servers.

Once you've got your Cloud Drive loaded up, you'll need somewhere to stream your music. That's where the next two new platforms come in - the Cloud Player for web and the Cloud Player for Android.

The web version works with all the usual browsers and is Mac, PC, Android tablet and Android phone compatible.

The Android version will come bundled with the new Amazon MP3 app, and features the entire digital store as well as a mobile-friendly version of the player.

With both versions, you can upload and download files, stream and manage playlists. Plus, all your music plays back in the bit-rate that your files were originally.

"We're excited to take this leap forward in the digital experience," said Bill Carr, vice president of Movies and Music at Amazon. "The launch of Cloud Drive, Cloud Player for Web and Cloud Player for Android eliminates the need for constant software updates as well as the use of thumb drives and cables to move and manage music."

"Our customers have told us they don't want to download music to their work computers or phones because they find it hard to move music around to different devices.

"Now, whether at work, home, or on the go, customers can buy music from Amazon MP3, store it in the cloud and play it anywhere."

The bad news: You guessed it, it's US-only at the moment. We'll update you as soon as we hear anything UK specific.

US Pocket-lint fans can take it for a spin now.

Tags: Cloud computing Amazon Amazon Cloud Drive Digital music Streaming Online Internet

Amazon Cloud Drive streams in originally appeared on http://www.pocket-lint.com on Tue, 29 Mar 2011 09:26:00 +0100

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