-Hey, I'm Donald Bell, and today, I'm giving you a first look at Amazon's Cloud Drive and Cloud Player.
For years, music fans have been pulling their hair out trying to find a way to consolidate all the stray music files across their computers and devices.
As a solution, Amazon offers Cloud Drive, which gives you a way to send all of your music files up to Amazon and either download them back to your computer or stream them on to other computers and gadgets.
The service starts with a 5-gigabyte plan but can scale up to 20, 50, or up to 1000 gigs
at a cost of about $1 per gigabyte per year.
The uploading and downloading tools run on Adobe AIR, so they work on both Mac and PC.
The interface is super simple and once your tracks are uploaded, you can use Amazon's browser-based Cloud Player to stream any music from your collection on any computer you want.
The player has an iTunes-like layout.
You can sort by song, artist, album, or genre; and there's also playlist support and the ability to create playlists.
You also have options over here for deleting or
downloading tracks, and it's worth mentioning that any songs you purchased from Amazon's MP3 store will be automatically backed up to your account.
If you're an Android user, Amazon gives you one more way to stream and manage your music using the Amazon MP3 app, which is also free.
The Cloud Drive is more than just music.
You can upload photos, documents, and videos as well.
But sites like Flickr and Google shouldn't be too worried since you're really just getting a generic file listing of your stuff using Cloud Drive.
Still, if you have a handful of precious files that you wanna backup along with your music, it's nice to have the option.
So, that's the Amazon Cloud Drive and Cloud Player--a great new tool for music fans.
For CNET.com, I'm Donald Bell.
