20GB of Amazon MP3 Cloud Storage for $.99 (and Gaga’s latest album too)

[oliverredfox]

Amazon has Lady Gaga’s Born This Way album on sale for $.99.  Purchasing any album off Amazon gets you an upgrade to 20GB with their new cloud drive system.  I haven’t messed around with their new cloud drive yet, but it lets you stream your music to a browser or android device.  They give you 5GB of space for free, but a dollar to upgrade to 20GB of storage seems good.  http://www.amazon.com/Born-This-Way-digital-booklet/dp/B0051QIGP4/  The Lady Gaga album is just icing on the cake for me.

[swoon]

I just received the invite to the Google Music Beta which, in theory, is a more compelling offer to me. Supposedly I can upload 20k songs to Google in any quality. I have a lot of Lossless WMA files I can throw at it :). Unless they do transcoding though, they won’t be too friendly for 3G streaming. In that case, I’ll throw the mp3-encoded versions up there.

[oliverredfox]

I signed up for google music when it first opened, still waiting for my invite to get sent.  I wonder how long until we’ll see plugins for MCE, XBMC, or others to access them.  I don’t need that access for my own music at home, but it’d be awesome to have guests over and let them type in account info and start playing their music off my home setup.

[swoon]

Maybe you’ll get it soon. I signed up the day it launched and just received the invite an hour ago.

I agree, for home use, I won’t use it, but accessing the library on the go using someone else’s server and storage is beneficial. 

[swoon]

Here’s a little more detail on Google Music from my experience so far. I was able to upload a lossless wma album. Google Music encodes it into a 320kbps mp3. Unfortunately, I think 320kbps is a bit too much for 3G (if the connection is not great) and besides, it’s not really necessary on a portable device. Instead, I took the Lame mp3 VBR-encoded version of my music library (~180 – 220 kbps) and uploaded that.

I was sort of hoping it could house the wma lossless files and just transcode to an appropriate bitrate on the fly depending on speed–extremely wishful thinking on my part . I was able to tell what Google Music was doing/not doing to the files by looking at the cached files stored by the Android player. The good news is they don’t touch the mp3 encoded files. They appear to be exactly what was uploaded.

The service is obviously in beta stage and a bit rough, but it definitely has potential. The browser is used for managing and playing the library on the PC. It is classic Google, simple but effective for covering the essentials. The Android player is basically an updated version of the standard music player with more eye candy and the sync functionality. The Android player will pre-cache songs it thinks you will listen to and songs can also be downloaded for offline listening.

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