So, at least from first glance,
this is my new music solution of the moment. Since that link just goes to Amazon's MP3 store, more specifically I'm referring to their online media player thing.
Basically, everyone with an Amazon account gets 5GB of online storage to use as you please. However, there are a couple of bonus features:
* Any music you put on there is playable by their "cloud player"
* Any music you buy from their online store doesn't count against your total
* There is an app for Android phones to play the tracks from there
I've messed around with
Subsonic before, but maintaining that solution requires a tiny amount of effort, which is more than I'm willing to put into it. At work I use
Grooveshark, but the music I play from there isn't music I own, and their Android app requires a decent amount of money, so that's out. I pay some small amount of money a year for
Pandora One, but while it plays music I like it doesn't play
my music, and its Android app is lame (though it's kind of cool that it
talks to my car). I use
Dropbox all the time and it's freaking glorious, but it doesn't have a media player, "only" gives 2GB free, and the Android app is a bit awkward. The Amazon thing seems to combine the good parts from many of these things into one service, which conveniently I get for free.
One interesting side effect is that I'm buying music again. I bought more music just
today than I've bought over the past four or five years. I'm pretty sure Amazon recouped their outlay for my 5GB this year just from my purchases this week. Not that I did much music piracy before, but between Grooveshark and Pandora I never really needed to own the music I listened to. It would be awesome if Amazon built some sort of "radio" functionality into their player, but that would likely subvert their business model. On the other hand, one could argue that Pandora seem to be working it out using yearly subscriptions and "buy this song you just heard" links, so it's not entirely farfetched.
What I really appreciate, however, is that I can use my own music on the service. And really, if I wanted to upload
all of it, I could just buy 50 GB of storage at the price of a dollar a gigabyte and put every single MP3 I've ever bought, ripped, or downloaded on that sucker. But even without that, I can use the 5GB they've given me as much as I want, and I don't have to buy a single track from Amazon. Nice.
The only real sticking point I can see is if you have like 100 GB of music and you are inexplicably attached to it all [1]. Though this isn't an insurmountable barrier (you can pay the $100 and get the extra storage), it starts to be cheaper just to buy a freaking iPod and carry it around with you.
Anyway, worth looking into.
[1] And if you argue that your attachment to 100 GB of music is in any way explicable than this post is not for you. Go tell someone that you were into their favorite band before they sold out.
