Amazon Cloud Player Gets Scan and Match Feature to Rival iTunes Match

[CentralDogma]

Amazon today announced a new scan and match feature for their iCloud player that gives customers a fast and easy way to get all of their music from their computers to the cloud.

New Cloud Player features include:

? Amazon MP3 purchases -- including music that customers purchased in the past -- are automatically saved to Cloud Player, which means that customers have a secure backup copy of the music they buy from Amazon, free of charge.

? Amazon scans customers' iTunes and Windows Media Player libraries and matches the songs on their computers to Amazon's 20 million song catalog. All matched songs ? even music purchased from iTunes or ripped from CDs ? are instantly made available in Cloud Player and are upgraded for free to high-quality 256 Kbps audio. Music that customers have already uploaded to Cloud Player also will be upgraded.

? Any customer with a Kindle Fire, Android device, iPhone, iPod touch, or any web browser -- and soon, a Roku streaming player or Sonos home entertainment system -- can play their music anywhere.

Cloud Player is available in a Free tier and a Premium tier. Cloud Player Free customers can store all MP3 music purchased at Amazon, plus import up to 250 songs from their PC or Mac to Cloud Player, all at no charge. Cloud Player Premium customers can import and store up to 250,000 songs in Cloud Player for an annual fee of $24.99. Amazon-purchased MP3s (including all previous purchases) do not count against the 250 or 250,000-song limits and will be added to both Free and Premium Cloud Player libraries at no charge. Amazon Cloud Player is automatically integrated into Kindle Fire and the new Cloud Player features will be automatically delivered to Kindle Fire users over the next few days. Customers can also visit www.amazon.com/cloudplayer or download the app on iOS or Android.

Starting today, Cloud Drive will be used for file storage and Cloud Player will be used for music storage and playback -- each service will offer separate subscriptions. Customers can still use Cloud Drive to store any of their files in the cloud and access them from any web browser or by using the Cloud Drive Desktop Apps. Customers can store up to 5GB free and storage plan prices have been lowered to start at $10 per year for 20 GB. To learn how to get started on Cloud Drive visit www.amazon.com/clouddrive/learnmore.

You can download Amazon Cloud Player from the App Store for free.

Source

The bad news is that they split up Cloud Player and Cloud Drive, so, unlike before, if you put music in your Cloud Drive, it won't show up in your Cloud Player. So now, instead of having 5GB to store external music, you can only store 250 songs. Personally, I'd much rather have the 5GB instead of the match functionality.