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Amazon Cloud Player Gains iOS Compatibility

Monday May 9, 2011 8:07 am PDT by Eric Slivka

Late last week, iFans noted that Amazon quietly made some changes to its new Cloud Player for playing music stored by users in its new Cloud Drive service, making the player compatible with iOS devices for the first time.

While it isn't quite as nice as an actual app, it provides nearly all of the functionality that you could ask for. Even the multitasking music controls work flawlessly. Sound quality is said to be "great," and the only part of it that is a little buggy seems to be the scrubbing capability.

Uploading music is unsupported on iOS due to the feature's reliance on Flash, although users are presumably most interested in batch uploading tracks from their primary computers. Drag-and-drop playlist rearranging also appears to be unsupported, and iOS support appears to be U.S.-only at the moment. The user interface is also not customized for the smaller screens of the iPhone and iPod touch, making navigation a bit awkward and requiring frequent panning and zooming.

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Top Rated Comments

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WestonHarvey1

103 months ago

I did not realize players in Safari got to use the multitasking bar audio controls.

That is neat.

Rating: 5 Votes

davie18

103 months ago

For people in the UK personally I think it's better to just subscribe to spotify and use that instead.

Rating: 5 Votes

goobot

103 months ago

Competition!!!! :D

What competition? Its a free service?

For when apple launches there's it will be competition for apple.

Rating: 4 Votes

rhett7660

103 months ago

This isn't too bad. Good for Amazon! This could only mean more customers for them which could equal more sales of media items!

Rating: 4 Votes

Daveoc64

103 months ago

What competition? Its a free service?

"Free" services can have competition.

Just because you aren't paying to use it directly it doesn't mean that someone isn't making money from you.

Google.com is "free" to use, yet they'd much rather you use that than Bing or Yahoo. They make money from advertising. Amazon makes money from selling you MP3s.

This site is free to use, but that doesn't mean there aren't other Apple-themed sites looking for ad revenue.

Rating: 4 Votes

odedia

103 months ago

Love Amazon, hate the music labels. They are the ones who restrict this feature for U.S. only. Why? God knows.

Rating: 3 Votes