Back in 2011, Amazon launched its Cloud Drive and Cloud Player services, with Cloud Drive offering cloud-based file storage and Cloud Player serving as the interface for playing music stored in Cloud Drive. Amazon has upgraded its service over time, offering unlimited music storage with any paid plan, free storage of Amazon MP3 Store purchases, and iTunes Match-like Scan and Match functionality to help users make their existing music libraries available in the cloud. The company also released native Cloud Player apps for iPhone in 2012 and iPad earlier this year.
Cloud Player support for Apple users expands again today, with Amazon announcing the launch of a new Cloud Player app for Mac.
The new app provides Mac users with a seamless way to manage their entire music library – whether saved on their computer or in the cloud – and shop from the Amazon MP3 Store with a catalog of more than 25 million songs.
Amazon Cloud Player for Mac features include:
- One-place for all your music: Play your Amazon and iTunes music all from one place, even when offline.
- A music library that is always up-to-date: Cloud Player automatically detects and adds new music to your library even if you bought it from iTunes or ripped a CD. The app does all the work for you.
- An integrated MP3 Store: You can shop from the Amazon MP3 catalog of more than 25 million songs and discover new music with personalized recommendations, all without having to leave the app.
- AutoRip: Buy an AutoRip CD or vinyl record from Amazon and a free MP3 version of the album will be added to your Cloud Player for Mac library.
- Built for speed: Forget bloated players with extra features you don’t need or use. Cloud Player for Mac is lean, mean and made for your music. It’ll get you from launch to play in seconds.
- Music management made simple: Download your MP3 purchases automatically or with one click. Export your music to other music players. Create and manage playlists using simple drag-and-drop.
- Instant search & play: Find music easily and quickly. Type anywhere to search for an artist, album or song and play directly from the search results.
- Rich artist content: See artist photos, bios, tweets, and gorgeous, large album art.
- Anywhere access: Music purchased using Amazon Cloud Player for Mac is securely backed up in the cloud for free and made instantly available on any Kindle Fire, Android phone or tablet, iPhone, iPad, iPod touch, Samsung TV, Roku, Sonos, PC or web browser.
Amazon Cloud Player for Mac is a 45 MB download and requires a minimum of OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard.
Top Rated Comments
As many of us now mostly consume our media on other devices (iPods, iPhones, Apple TVs) iTunes should be less about viewing media, and more about managing media IMO. Yet with every iteration they remove useful management features, fill it with useless consumption views, and don't enhance management capabilities.
Seems to be based on the Chromium embedded framework and Adobe Air or some such terrible cross-platform solution. Ugh. :(
While all the music options are nice, I prefer to convert all my movies to digital and am waiting for a movie cloud not owned by Walmart. Come on Google!!!
Same here in UK - another disappointing 'launch' from Amazon