Amazon announces unlimited MP3 storage with any Cloud Drive plan (opens in new tab)

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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."

You can use the web player through safari.

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

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.