#cloud locker

The adventure continues with trying to find an alternative to iTunes Match.

Amazon Cloud Player - So It's been roughly 2 days and the upload is still going.  The upload crashed at about the 19000th song, and I didn't notice all last night.  It's finishing up the last 400 tracks right now.

The initial sync and matching Amazon did matched up ! 12,000 of the songs without me needing to upload them.  This is about 6000 short of what iTunes was able to do last year when I started using Match.  This left me with uploading 9000 songs, which has taken a considerable time.   Something to keep in mind.

 After matching, the screen shows the progress for uploading:

I've been testing and playing music quite a bit from the Amazon web player, and I am not disappointed, but it is so vanilla that it pains me.    I also really don't like having my browser be my music player because I can never find which tab the music is playing on to mute it when I have a call.

I verified that the app works in IE10 Metro as well.

There is extremely limited 3rd party support for anything in this cloud.  Either do to Amazon licensing, or people just not caring.   There is one Linux app and some hardware devices that can stream music off the service, but that's it.

Once the upload is complete on Amazon, I am going to see what happens when I try to have it import playlists from iTunes.  I've heard some horror stories about duplicate music when that happens, but we'll see :)

Google Play -  I've been doing some checking on this and Google actually does sound like a great solution but they have a hard limit of 20,000 songs.  I am already 1000 over that.   They have an iOS app now (I didn't know about that before), and there are some third party apps that can stream music from the service on a Windows Phone.

Their upload tool also seems quite a bit nicer than Amazon.  You can throttle bandwidth usage

There are many more 3rd party options for Google's system and once they allow more than 20,000 songs I may give them a try.

"Yesterday we looked at the three leading "cloud locker" services for music: iTunes Match, Amazon Cloud Drive and Google Music. As a preface to that post, I mentioned that there are two main battles going on in the online music market. One is between the three cloud lockers, which are competing to be the online archive for your digital music collection. The second battle is between music streaming services like Spotify, Rdio and MOG.

But while we currently think of cloud lockers as being different from streaming services, the two types will merge over time. This has begun to happen already."