E-Commerce company Amazon has launched its Cloud Drive for storage of personal files and Cloud Player for live streaming music.
Amazon Cloud Drive is a hard drive in the cloud. The company says that by using the cloud, users could store their music, videos, photos, and documents on its secure servers to use files even when the users’ computer has crashed, is lost or stolen. One needs a Web browser to upload, download, and access files from any computer.
Cloud Drive comes with 5GB of free storage, which Amazon says is enough space to store up to 1000 songs. The company will never charge for the 5GB storage.
The new Cloud Player is a music player that lets users upload the music in their Macs or PCs to Amazon’s servers and play them via the Web or Android anytime anywhere.
To use the service, one has to purchase a song or album from the Amazon MP3 Store and click the "Save to Amazon Cloud Drive" button after the purchase is complete. The purchase will be saved for free, says Amazon.
The Cloud Player service features an option to upload music from a hard drive to a user’s Cloud Drive as well. Files can be in AAC or MP3 formats and uploading is done in the original bit rate. However, there is an upper limit to the size of the music files at 100MB. Non-music audio files such as audiobooks, podcasts and ringtones cannot be uploaded as well.
Amazon is providing 5GB of free storage to users, but offers 20GB free with a purchase of an album through the e-Commerce site, which would otherwise cost $20 per year. Amazon estimates 20GB can store up to 4,000 tracks, 8,000 photos or 1.5 hours of HD video.
At present, files cannot be uploaded form mobile devices.
