Amazon announces unlimited MP3 storage with any Cloud Drive plan

E-mail I just received from Amazon. I can't believe how exactly right this this, and how unexpected that is.<p>(full disclosure, I am an Amazon employee, not affiliated with the MP3 or cloud drive team. I was just independently motivated to share this, because not one hour earlier I had been looking at my downgrade options on my phone).<p>"Information About Your Cloud Drive Account<p>Hello,<p>Thanks for your prior purchase of the 100 GB Amazon Cloud Drive storage plan. Beginning today, all paid Cloud Drive storage plans include unlimited space for MP3 and AAC (.m4a) music files at no extra charge for a limited time. Learn more here:<p><a href="http://www.amazon.com/mp3gettingstarted" rel="nofollow">http://www.amazon.com/mp3gettingstarted</a><p>Because your current plan now includes unlimited space for music, we're refunding the difference between the cost of your original Cloud Drive plan of 100 GB and the cost of a current 20 GB plan ($20), which is the least-expensive Cloud Drive plan that includes unlimited space for music. A refund of $80 will be issued to the card originally used for your Amazon Cloud Drive storage plan. Refunds are typically completed within 10 business days and will appear as a credit on your credit card statement.<p>We hope to see you again soon!<p>Sincerely,<p>The Amazon MP3 Team <a href="http://www.amazon.com/mp3" rel="nofollow">http://www.amazon.com/mp3</a>

Q: What is the cloud?<p>A: The cloud is a term used to describe the Internet. [...]<p>Hm; that kind of straightforwardness is actually kind of refreshing.

Clarification, obvious: You only get unlimited MP3 (and AAC) storage with any <i>paid</i> Cloud Drive plan. You won't get it with the free 5GB plan.<p>Of course, I think most people are probably on the 20GB plan since Amazon was giving those away with the purchase of an MP3 album for quite some time.

Are there any indications on what "for a limited time" means? Is there a term for which Amazon has promised to provide this service for free? Once the unlimited storage is no longer offered, will the existing files in the cloud be 'grandfathered' in and continue to be free to store, or will people be expected to pay or face loss of access to the files in the Cloud Drive?

I wonder how much verification is done that the files are MP3? You could reasonably put other data inside MP3 containers and use Cloud Drive as a nice, inexpensive backup solution.<p>Time to start writing a tool ;)

Okay I tried and failed: what qualifies as "eligible" MP3 and AAC files? I misread the "Learn More" link that was related to previous purchases as being the "Learn More" for eligible files, but afaict that "Learn More" link related to eligible files isn't active so I'm confused as to what will qualify as eligible.

So.... the paranoid part of me thinks this sounds like:<p>"Upload all of your mp3/aac files for free with any paid cloud drive plan... until we start charging for the 'mp3/aac files don't count towards your quota' option, which is $9.99/mo."

Amazon seems to use images of text an awful lot. Anyone know why that is?

Well, that's kind of interesting. I just bought 100G so I could store all my mp3s in the cloud player while travelling. After uploading about 40G, this plan must have activated, and it shows "&#60; 1%" of 100G used. Cool idea: I might use the space for data now.

Still no Linux support? :(<p>(I know about the web-based uploader, but it's super-clunky for uploading more than one or two albums - unlimited MP3 storage is no good if you have to spend a week navigating the interface, never mind the actual upload time!)

Wow, Amazon continues to amaze. I'd really love an iPhone app, though. This is kind of useless for me until they release one (I prefer iTunes to listening to music on my laptop, it's faster and has a nicer interface.)

What's to stop me from changing all my file names to 'mp3'?

I wonder why they are not offering ogg vorbis support. Is it just not as popular? Are the files typically larger? Either way, it's a glaring omission imo.

So I get unlimited space for music at $20/yr? Umm, yeah sign me up unless there's a catch.<p>Unlimited space for music details Limited time offer: All paid storage plans include unlimited space for music at no additional charge. Upload as many songs as you like without taking up any of your storage space. Listen to your music anywhere with Amazon Cloud Player.

Big win. I got a free 20gb account for a year just for buying a Johnny Winter CD (as MP3s) and I'll certainly pay for 20g after my free year is up.<p>I am using the player right now: very convenient to use from my laptop or droid. I haven't tried it from the living room on Google TV yet but that should also work fine.

If I wanted to sue people for having pirated copies of my content, the first thing I would do is ask everyone to upload all their files to my servers so I could inspect them. If I paid them, they probably wouldn't even realize that I was out to get them.

I'd really like to know which of my files were not "eligible". I selected a folder which had 9,192 MP3 / M4A files in it, and only 6,822 were "eligible". I'm fine with some not being able to be uploaded, but please tell me which ones.

Anyone have experience mounting the Amazon Cloud Drive on OSX? It's apparently different than S3.<p>I did find a reference to mounting it as a virtual drive on Windows.<p>Specifically I was wondering about the possibility of rsync.

I wonder how much offering this actually costs them.<p>There must be some serious file duplication between users especially if they're offering unlimited mp3 sharing, since many people will have the same MP3 files (they can profit off piracy while pretending it doesn't exist).<p>If they're really clever about it they might even store the data separately (which will increase duplicate collisions quite a lot due to retagging)

This, my friends, is why competition in markets is a great thing.

No FLAC support?