Amazon Cloud

[Resurrection Man]

my points are very simple

amazon provides an excellent service at a good price [and often reaches an outstanding level of service and responsiveness]

it pays all the tax it is obliged to even if that is a pittance [politicians to fix not me the consumer]

amazon is by no means alone in this tax posture

starbucks are rapacious profiteers and expensive .... so i do not go there at all ...

you can boycott who you like ... it bears no moral imperative on my choices ...

that is all ....

Sleep easy then.

[robk]

I keep looking at this thread because I am interested in the possible benefits of Amazon Cloud but it has been diverted for days into a discussion on tax avoidance.

[aka Calum Da Jazbo]

robk not my intent ... i find the cloud very useful as a means to access my purchases from different bits of kit [pc, kindle, laptop] etc ...rather like gmail is great as well ...

i am an avid reader of both fiction and non fiction; i find it very reassuring to be able to access my non fiction library on line at any time [fiction is mostly thrillers etc so i don't cry if they disappear on my hard disc, well not so much!]

i suspect if you do not use a kindle then there may be less in the Amazon cloud for you [ i do not use any apple kit for example]

the down side is perhaps the emails that Amazon stream at me now, but they are not alone in this practice ... [apple are no slouches] and i quite enjoy reading camera and hifi specs and promos, which they have correctly deduced i am interested in ..

i do not upload stuff and would probably do this on google+ in any case as it is where we collaborate on work projects ...

i have a very large music library in digital format way beyond the free allowances and it resides on portable hard drives and machine storage .... i use an ipod so see no need for cloud music storage ... but books i find an absolute no brainer for me .... i have not one further millimetre of shelf space available at home so having ebooks is now mandatory for me and therefore i have grown more than accustomed to it - in fact i prefer it ... the new high definition kindle with colour screen suits my eyes very well and is smaller than an ipad ...

the free storage allowance is only for material you upload, purchases do not count against this limit, so the cloud provides a remarkable back up for books, music, films etc ...on any device anywhere any time ... i probably get less than half of what it has to offer but you can tell i am a fan ...

[robk]

Thank you for that helpful summary. I have 270 Gb of music on a second internal hard drive backed up to a Passport 1Tb external drive which I take with me if I go away from home. This is growing fast but there is plenty of space for now. I have held back from tablets so far but it is very tempting. It seems likely to me that cloud storage will become the norm in the future because if its independence from any particular device and presumably reliable backup systems, although I am not sure that I could entrust anything special to an unkown server located who knows where.

It does seem a bit absurd that we are all buying the same CD's, ripping them to hard drives, organising databases etc. although it does give me some pleasure doing it. I did try Spotify Premium for a while. It is good but not comprehensive enough to replace the personal library.

[Dave2002]

Now that this is available in the UK I thought I'd try it. It was quite easy on the first machine I tried, and I was surprised at how many tracks I'd already bought from Amazon. I did have problems getting it installed on other machines however, and one machine (at least) wanted new versions of Flash, and then wouldn't install it. I ended up hours later having run virus checks and various other things, uninstalling and trying to reinstall Flash, and then finally uninstalling Firefox and reinstalling it, and then Flash, with what seems to be a working version.

Does anyone know what quality level the amazon cloud streams are? Are they the same as the original downloaded material? What I'm listening to now sounds as good as, if not better than, the original download. It's from the Vamska Sibelius complete symphonies plus violin concerto. Do they make any claims re quality? It certainly doesn't sound bad, as with some compressed music I've heard in the past.

I've not tried uploading anything yet to check how that works. It should also work on my iPad with an app, but unfortunately my iPad is still running early versions of iOS so it'll be even more work to bring that up to new versions which will run the cloud app.

Of course one obvious problem will be if there are interruptions to internet service - which wouldn't affect previously downloaded and stored material run directly via a computer, mp3 player or CD player.

[Dave2002]

PS to previous. Just noticed that while the player is running it tries to entice you with new purchases. Some don't seem bad - Schnabel Beethoven piano sonatas for £1.09 - if it's the complete set - could be reasonable value, and I don't suppose the quality will be compromised much if at all by the compression. Similarly for Toscanini Beethoven symphonies for £4.99. I'm not rushing to buy new material as downloads, but some might be worthwhile. It works a bit like Last.fm and other players too, and lets you know what other people have played or are playing.

[Resurrection Man]

..... It should also work on my iPad with an app, but unfortunately my iPad is still running early versions of iOS so it'll be even more work to bring that up to new versions which will run the cloud app.
....

You probably already know this but not all iPads can be brought up to the latest iOS. If you have an original iPad then 5.1.1 is the highest version that you can upgrade to.