E-mail I just received from Amazon. I can't believe how exactly right this this, and how unexpected that is.

(full disclosure, I am an Amazon employee, not affiliated with the MP3 or cloud drive team. I was just independently motivated to share this, because not one hour earlier I had been looking at my downgrade options on my phone).

"Information About Your Cloud Drive Account

Hello,

Thanks for your prior purchase of the 100 GB Amazon Cloud Drive storage plan. Beginning today, all paid Cloud Drive storage plans include unlimited space for MP3 and AAC (.m4a) music files at no extra charge for a limited time. Learn more here:

http://www.amazon.com/mp3gettingstarted

Because your current plan now includes unlimited space for music, we're refunding the difference between the cost of your original Cloud Drive plan of 100 GB and the cost of a current 20 GB plan ($20), which is the least-expensive Cloud Drive plan that includes unlimited space for music. A refund of $80 will be issued to the card originally used for your Amazon Cloud Drive storage plan. Refunds are typically completed within 10 business days and will appear as a credit on your credit card statement.

We hope to see you again soon!

Sincerely,

The Amazon MP3 Team http://www.amazon.com/mp3

Q: What is the cloud?

A: The cloud is a term used to describe the Internet. [...]

Hm; that kind of straightforwardness is actually kind of refreshing.

Clarification, obvious: You only get unlimited MP3 (and AAC) storage with any paid Cloud Drive plan. You won't get it with the free 5GB plan.

Of course, I think most people are probably on the 20GB plan since Amazon was giving those away with the purchase of an MP3 album for quite some time.

Are there any indications on what "for a limited time" means? Is there a term for which Amazon has promised to provide this service for free? Once the unlimited storage is no longer offered, will the existing files in the cloud be 'grandfathered' in and continue to be free to store, or will people be expected to pay or face loss of access to the files in the Cloud Drive?

I don't know what "for a limited time" means, but when accounts get downgraded, you keep the higher storage capacity until the end of the billing cycle. Then they give you a limited amount of time to delete files and download them.

Likely a combination of both, similar to Dropbox's freemium.

I wonder how much verification is done that the files are MP3? You could reasonably put other data inside MP3 containers and use Cloud Drive as a nice, inexpensive backup solution.

Time to start writing a tool ;)

Well, if I were to do it, I'd probably implement a few checks.

I would check to make sure that the ID3 information was no more than, say, 10% of the total file size. (I'd probably adjust the percentage based on actually inspecting a large collection of files; say, the ones available for download through Amazon.)

I'd probably make sure that the resulting sound output had a regular pattern - a steady beat, etc - and flag for review anything that wasn't, probably with a rating of how likely it is for the file to not be an mp3.

And obviously, scan the file to make sure that it doesn't obviously contain an archive, images, ASCII text that falls within the KJV bible distribution, and check for other formats; someone renaming stolen_e_book.pdf into music.mp3 would probably be pretty obvious.

People did this to share non-mp3 files on the original Napster. I wonder if Wrapster still runs... http://www.team-mp3.com/mp3/wrapster.htm

Thank-you for that dose of nostalgia.

On "eligibility" requirements:

>Note: Music recordings in other formats, lossless files, or audio recordings that are not of songs and non-audio files (even if in MP3 or AAC format) are not eligible for unlimited music space and will count against your Cloud Drive storage space.

I have to wonder if this is simply a TOS issue or if Amazon is actually doing something similar to iTunes Match and creating audio fingerprints of your songs so as to de-duplicate them.

Okay I tried and failed: what qualifies as "eligible" MP3 and AAC files? I misread the "Learn More" link that was related to previous purchases as being the "Learn More" for eligible files, but afaict that "Learn More" link related to eligible files isn't active so I'm confused as to what will qualify as eligible.

In my cloud drive settings (I have a temporarily-free-with-purchase 20GB account):

"Upload an unlimited number of songs in any supported file format with Amazon Cloud Player.

Supported file formats for songs Cloud Drive currently supports song files in the following formats:

.mp3—Standard non-DRM file format (Includes Amazon MP3 Store purchased files)

.m4a—AAC files (Includes iTunes store purchased files)

Any MP3 or AAC files added to your Cloud Drive will be available for playback and download using Amazon Cloud Player. Upload your music now with Amazon Cloud Player."

Do you know if this includes filters for length? For instance would rips of audiobooks be viewed as eligible for free storage?

Answered here, somewhat: http://www.amazon.com/gp/help/customer/display.html/?nodeId=...

> Files must be music recordings in MP3 (.mp3) or AAC (.m4a, iTunes non-DRM files) format and must be less than 100 MB in size... audio recordings that are not of songs and non-audio files (even if in MP3 or AAC format) are not eligible for unlimited music space.

So.... the paranoid part of me thinks this sounds like:

"Upload all of your mp3/aac files for free with any paid cloud drive plan... until we start charging for the 'mp3/aac files don't count towards your quota' option, which is $9.99/mo."

Amazon seems to use images of text an awful lot. Anyone know why that is?

Maybe they have an internal tool that generates text/image composites like this from something like Markdown. We did that for one of our product sites; it was pretty handy.

I worked at Amazon for a while as an intern, but I didn't see how a ton of the external facing stuff worked like this. So in some ways, this is mostly speculation.

I notice one big thing about image-based announcements: I'd rarely hear about the publicly first, and I'd definitely not hear about them internally in an official way. Leak-proofing things.

I suspect the reason for images is because it's simply harder for PR/management types to make a decent looking webpage that works in multiple browsers. It's way faster to export an image from whatever software they use to generate it.

And I suspect it avoids deployment headaches.

Images lookup service may show this, increasing barriers to being paraphrased (meaning official looking and link on it) and solid metric with SEO juice if hot linked.

It's akin to infographic SEO (You can look it up).

I keep trying to copy the text to share with someone, but failing. Maybe they don't want people to know.

Looks like they have standardized on a 475 pixel width headline image for each section. In this case, it has lots of text, but usually it has product photos emphasized with headline text.

Very frustrating for anyone who is on mobile or happens to like how their text renders. These images are flat out difficult to read in places.

But since I bought an MP3 album a while back, I effectively have a free cloud to store my 40GB of music in. I'll take text-ful-images for that.

Are you planning on actually using it? I uploaded some music to Amazon's mp3 when it first launched and more to Google's MP3 and I have found very little need to use either one. I obviously can't fit all my music on my phone (an android) but I generally am ok with the music I have at any particular time and swapping.

I don't stream much with it on my phone. But it's great to be able to download the album(s) I want to the device without needing to connect to my computer.

Also, can never have too many backup copies of my music.

> Also, can never have too many backup copies of my music.

That's going to be my primary use of this service. I already have ways of accessing my music on my home machine remotely. But an additional offsite cloud backup of 150GB for $20 a year? Sold.

I hate syncing my Fascinate with my computer. Almost more than anything. Data sync across two computers, a laptop, a chromebook and an Android phone is a nightmare.

I currently serve my media off of SubSonic but the interface is tired, the API is restricted and pay-walled, and the Android app sucks. Amazon solves all of this.

I definitely will be using it. Plus I can buy cheap-o Class 6 SDcards.

Well, that's kind of interesting. I just bought 100G so I could store all my mp3s in the cloud player while travelling. After uploading about 40G, this plan must have activated, and it shows "< 1%" of 100G used. Cool idea: I might use the space for data now.

Still no Linux support? :(

(I know about the web-based uploader, but it's super-clunky for uploading more than one or two albums - unlimited MP3 storage is no good if you have to spend a week navigating the interface, never mind the actual upload time!)

Wow, Amazon continues to amaze. I'd really love an iPhone app, though. This is kind of useless for me until they release one (I prefer iTunes to listening to music on my laptop, it's faster and has a nicer interface.)

You can use the web player through safari.

What's to stop me from changing all my file names to 'mp3'?

I wonder why they are not offering ogg vorbis support. Is it just not as popular? Are the files typically larger? Either way, it's a glaring omission imo.

I'm not an expert, but I've been doing a little research on audio file compression to cut down on Amazon S3 charges for a personal site I have up that suddenly got a fair amount of traffic. The way I understand it, ogg vorbis files actually compress better than mp3s, so they're better on a quality/size ratio. A 3MB ogg file will generally sound better than a 3MB mp3 file.

I think the reason Amazon might not be supporting them is that not all browsers can play them natively — specifically, Safari needs a plug-in to play them. So, for my site, which is using jPlayer, I have to compress all the files as .oga and .mp3, then set up the mp3s as a fallback so Safari will stream them.

Almost no one uses Ogg, not a very glaring omission in my opinion. Amazon sells MP3s. Apple sells AACs. No one with any market share sells Ogg files.

This doesn't apply here but it is interesting: there is one major player making heavy use of ogg, and that is spotify. All their streaming is done in ogg.

AFAIK all games sound and music have been in ogg format for ages.

And none of that would be in Amazon Music... Again, no one with any serious market share sells music in Ogg.

The amount of music sold in file format is totally dwarved by the amount sold on CDs. For a while I used to rip to ogg, I'm probably not the only one.

My assumption is that this is a strategic move against Apple and ipod/iphone doesn't support ogg, so it doesn't come into play. Just a guess.

So I get unlimited space for music at $20/yr? Umm, yeah sign me up unless there's a catch.

Unlimited space for music details Limited time offer: All paid storage plans include unlimited space for music at no additional charge. Upload as many songs as you like without taking up any of your storage space. Listen to your music anywhere with Amazon Cloud Player.

Big win. I got a free 20gb account for a year just for buying a Johnny Winter CD (as MP3s) and I'll certainly pay for 20g after my free year is up.

I am using the player right now: very convenient to use from my laptop or droid. I haven't tried it from the living room on Google TV yet but that should also work fine.

If I wanted to sue people for having pirated copies of my content, the first thing I would do is ask everyone to upload all their files to my servers so I could inspect them. If I paid them, they probably wouldn't even realize that I was out to get them.

How could they really know if the music you uploaded was pirated? Even if your stuff is tagged with scene groups, that's not even close to proof that you pirated it.

I imagine through fingerprinting, checksums of files, etc. Though that's not fool-proof as people can an do change the metadata, filenames, etc of the files they download. (That's not even touching people that download FLAC and then convert to mp3 for 'actual usage').

Easy enough to claim fair use. "I had this on CD, but it was more convenient to download it rather than rip it myself." seems pretty bulletproof to me.

If they come to you with a lawsuit threat, you'll still have to pay money to argue that defense in court.

Not only can people change metadata, there's also a good possibility that a scene group and an innocent home user would make separate rips of a CD that would be bit for bit identical. There are checksum databases online that enthusiast rippers can use to verify that a ripped CD is identical to the results other rippers have achieved (i.e. no errors occurred in the ripping process).

There is a whole technical community dedicated to getting quality CD rips. As an example to how serious people are about this, one technique is to disable or circumvent the optical drive's buffer and make multiple read requests to each area of the disc to help ensure that the correct data was pulled in.

http://www.accuraterip.com/

http://www.digital-inn.de/forum14/

That would be the downfall of Amazon. They're simply competing with Apple.

I'd really like to know which of my files were not "eligible". I selected a folder which had 9,192 MP3 / M4A files in it, and only 6,822 were "eligible". I'm fine with some not being able to be uploaded, but please tell me which ones.

Completely, 100% never mind. There's a small, not-so-obvious link for "Music that cannot be uploaded"

Anyone have experience mounting the Amazon Cloud Drive on OSX? It's apparently different than S3.

I did find a reference to mounting it as a virtual drive on Windows.

Specifically I was wondering about the possibility of rsync.

This, my friends, is why competition in markets is a great thing.

No FLAC support?

The Cloud Player Web and Android apps don't support FLAC, and the unlimited storage only applies to MP3 and AAC files.

But you're able to store any kind of files in Cloud Drive if you just want access to them to copy to different computers.