Amazon Music Ending Support For Uploaded Files

Discussion in 'Audio Hardware' started by sunspot42, Dec 20, 2017.

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  1. I used to feel the need to take most or all of my digital music with me so I kept upgrading iPods until they stopped at 160GB. I was disappointed when it all slowed down and then stopped, as the cloud was coming online.
    I wanted to have the choice to listen to everything but in reality I focused on new music and then artists I was in the mood for that week or two.

    I know have almost 3TB of lossless music on an external HD with backup is several places around the country. I no longer have interest to have everything on hand. When I drive my car has Apple Car Play so every couple of weeks I update my iPhone with about 3000 songs. I include all the last albums I've purchased plus whatever I'm in the mood for. It is great.

    I was also flying weekly for awhile but that has now slowed down. I feel that these 3000 songs were enough however I also have around 10,000 more songs playable via the Amazon music app from albums I've purchased from Amazon since 1998. That was a nice surprise when that went online.

    I understand the whole cloud thing but I will never trust or pay tp keep my collection up there. Once you stop paying it goes away or the company moves on to the next new thing. This happened with PhotoBucket after ten years of uploading images. Suddenly the held your images hostage unless you paid much more.

    Sure I'd love to have my whole collection with me everywhere, but I find that when I'm home, my huge record and CD collection are there for me to really listen to and enjoy and the road is for a different musical experience.
     
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  2. sunspot42

    sunspot42 Forum Resident Thread Starter

    Location:
    San Francisco
    I can't hall all 1,000 or whatever CDs with me everywhere I go. I can access my entire library - plus a lot of stuff I don't own but that Amazon makes available for free via Prime - using Amazon Music. Apple and Google offer similar services, hence the appeal.

    Everything. All the time. I did the iPod shuffle where I'd create massive playlists to sync, and that became a huge chore, and I never seemed to have the tracks I wanted to listen to on the iPod when I wanted them. Feh.

    Beyond the playlists I setup on Amazon Music, they have no "power" over my "stuff". My "stuff" is happily parked on my drives at home (and at an offsite backup provider).

    Setting up the playlists to control syncing 256GB at a time is a huge PITA, and you never seem to have the tracks you want on the phone when you want them. I gave up on syncing. I want access to the full library, all the time. I did sink a bit of time into setting up my Amazon Music account and uploading a slew of files, but it was largely a one-time thing and I've been enjoying the service for a couple of years now. If I get three years of use out of that effort it was still a good deal for the price - better than faffing around with syncing tracks to (dying) iPods and schlepping an iPod with me wherever I go in addition to my iPhone.
     
  3. Well I guess they now have power over your stuff on the road if it won't be available anymore soon from the cloud.
     
  4. Rolltide

    Rolltide Forum Resident

    Location:
    Vallejo, CA
    I hate to see anybody's music workflow get broken, but I guess this was pretty inevitable. Services like this debuted with the upload-your-own-stuff paradigm because they weren't done negotiating with the music labels, but once the modern streaming model was in place it was kind of leftover cruft as far as the companies are concerned. Not enough customers to bother with the infrastructure.

    My NAS backs up to Google Drive so my music is there. I've noticed you can play the files from the web interface, and I've seen apps that will do it as well. I imagine you can test it with the free space that comes with Gmail. If you wanted to stick with Amazon there are apps and players that stream from S3 as well, but that's not quite as user friendly as Amazon's "civilian cloud" of course.
     
  5. bluemooze

    bluemooze Senior Member

    Location:
    Frenchtown NJ USA
    Why do you need 1,000 or whatever CDs when you leave the house? :)
     
    jay.dee, Shak Cohen and dalem5467 like this.
  6. Think of us kids in the 60s and 70s. At first we never had music on the go expect what came out of a transistor radio and then nothing on demand. In the 70s maybe we had a hand full of 8 tracks or cassettes for a road trip?
    And we lived in a shoe box on the side of the road....... :tiphat:
     
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  7. sunspot42

    sunspot42 Forum Resident Thread Starter

    Location:
    San Francisco
    Not really - still have all of my "stuff". Just won't have that copy of it anymore after a year. Not the end of the world, since I can stream it all from my home Subsonic server now.

    Yeah, I've thought about migrating my library to S3 or Google Drive or maybe even Microsoft's OneDrive. I subscribed to Office which is supposed to come with I guess a TB of OneDrive storage space, but I'm not seeing it. Sent a nastygram to Microsoft but haven't seen a response. The office subscription itself isn't such a great deal, but with a TB of cloud storage it becomes a really good deal...

    I don't - I can stream my entire library from Subsonic. But that's not a convenient - or even feasible - option for all users. Which is why it's sad Amazon Music is going away, as it was the best of the cloud music server options I thought for folks with large libraries.
     
    bluemooze likes this.
  8. Rolltide

    Rolltide Forum Resident

    Location:
    Vallejo, CA
    It seems these days that just about every thread on this and similar topics have to devolve into the white-knighting of the compact disc.
     
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  9. Baroque

    Baroque Forum Resident

    Yeah, I don't understand why so many people feel the need to be so, "it's either this OR that!" Music collections can work hand-in-hand in so many ways.

    Anyway, I gave up on Amazon Music a long time ago, instead opting to use iBroadcast. I can store my entire FLAC collection (streaming is downgraded though) for free. They keep claiming there'll be add on costs for special features at some point but it's been great over the past few years. There's a web browser so I can stream at work and an iPhone app that I occasionally use.
     
  10. sunspot42

    sunspot42 Forum Resident Thread Starter

    Location:
    San Francisco
    Subsonic mostly works well for me, although the iPhone players aren't perfect. Biggest problem comes whenever they upgrade the Windows streaming service - it messes up the special permissions it needs, and I have to go in and fiddle with it or else it can't see my library anymore. Annoying.

    I do miss the free tracks that Amazon made available, although those were a constantly-shifting target. Still, it was nice to be able to throw tracks I didn't own in with stuff I did on a single playlist.
     
  11. sunspot42

    sunspot42 Forum Resident Thread Starter

    Location:
    San Francisco
    I've found that people with limited cognitive abilities generally see things in black and white terms, and often miss the obvious as a result. They tend to try to fit facts into their preconceived notions, instead of adjusting their quaint notions to fit the facts.
     
  12. jeffmackwood

    jeffmackwood Forum Resident

    Location:
    Ottawa
    Condolences.

    I guess I was lucky. Mine was pretty close to being simply plug and play. It came with very clear and easy to follow instructions. I'm no computer nerd.

    My one small quibble with the product is that uploading files is relatively slow, even given the very fast wired connections between devices. Say 1/10th the normal speed of copying something to a hard drive via USB 3.0. I think part of that is due to it being a server, not just a hard drive, and its need to index / catalogue everything (if that's the right terminology.) But once uploaded and indexed, files stream without issue. I've accessed mine from many places around the world (It goes without saying that access within my home is not an issue either!)

    I've purposely not mentioned the brand name of the server, because I have some serious post-purchase issues with their service (not the product.) These were all company-specific and not at all related to the technology per se. If I were doing it again, knowing what I know now, I'd shop around for other companies with similar offerings.

    Jeff
     
    sunspot42 likes this.
  13. sunspot42

    sunspot42 Forum Resident Thread Starter

    Location:
    San Francisco
    The indexing is killer. I tried using the DLNA server on my WD MyCloud external drive but gave up on it. Slow, buggy, a mess. Unfortunate.

    Ultimately I suspect the best solution might be a cloud-based server with the files parked out on S3 or Google Drive or OneDrive or whatever. Those file storage services aren't likely to go away anytime soon, so once the upload was done most of the setup would be in place. The cloud-based server might come and go, although a lot of that stuff is open source and might never truly "go away".
     
  14. Ric-Tic

    Ric-Tic Forum Resident

    Location:
    Stockholm
    What about Google play? If you don't wish to tinker with you own server or a cloud server solution? I admit I haven't used it for a very long time, and last time I did I thought it was ok~ish solution. But most of my music was on Spotify so I didn't bother to *play* with it much.
     
  15. Rolltide

    Rolltide Forum Resident

    Location:
    Vallejo, CA
    I use Google Play and augment it by uploading albums I care about that aren't on there. Originally I had my entire library uploaded but removed it when I went to the paid version as it was easier to navigate (no dupes, better metadata, etc).

    Does Apple Music allow for a transparent combination of streaming music and user uploaded music? I ask because I use Google Play because I have an Android phone and its native, I don't consider it better or worse then its competition.
     
  16. jeffmackwood

    jeffmackwood Forum Resident

    Location:
    Ottawa
    Google is pure evil.

    The less it knows about me that I don't want it to know the better. Including my choice(s) in music.

    Dang! Now it knows what I think about it!

    Hold on, someone's at the door..........
     
  17. Arnold_Layne

    Arnold_Layne Forum Resident

    Location:
    Waldorf, MD USA
    Plex Pass and set it up as a media server wherever your music is stored on HDD. You can stream to just about any device connected to the network and over the internet as well. If you have an unlimited data plan, you can pretty much play your music stored on your computer on your terms any where.
     
    SamS likes this.
  18. rl1856

    rl1856 Forum Resident

    Location:
    SC
    Yet another example proving you no longer own anything you upload to cloud storage. And this is by design. The computer and media industries want to migrate all users to a paygo model...leases for equipment, monthly subscriptions for media access, monthly subscriptions for streaming, annual subscriptions for software etc. Eventually the concept of individual ownership will cease to exist in the virtual world. Consumers want to get off of the upgrade hamster wheel, the industry wants a recurring revenue stream. Who do you think will win ?

    I find streaming services and cloud archives to be useful. But I also do not fool myself into thinking it is a permanent solution to my desire for permanent access to MY content. I DO have a NAS that I can access as needed.
     
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  19. Gaslight

    Gaslight ⎧⚍⎫⚑

    Location:
    Northeast USA
    OneDrive has been the best solution I've found (so far) from the major players. Supports AAC / WMA / MP3 uploads and doesn't require them to be converted. And Groove Music has supported playing these OD files for I believe about two years now.

    Generally I prefer keeping my music local but it's a nice streaming option if I need it. Only "con" is the cost for the storage per year but if you pay for Office 365 already then you already get 1TB of OneDrive storage.
     
    sunspot42 likes this.
  20. Gaslight

    Gaslight ⎧⚍⎫⚑

    Location:
    Northeast USA
    The next time someone posts that their CD player has failed and they now have to buy a new one, you should have a pass now to post

    "And that’s why I keep my streaming solution"
     
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  21. Because the internet never goes down :tiphat:
     
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  22. Gaslight

    Gaslight ⎧⚍⎫⚑

    Location:
    Northeast USA
    As long as you don't drop it.

    [​IMG]
     
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  23. uofmtiger

    uofmtiger Forum Resident

    Location:
    Memphis, TN
    I think there is a misconception that “uploading” you files means that they get moved from your computer to the cloud. No, they simply get matched to the files they already have on their servers, unless they have no match then they may upload it. Your original file stays where it is.

    I only use the Amazon service to access my own music on the Amazon Echo Dots around the house. I will decide what I want to do about this issue in 2019. Maybe it will just work with my NAS by then. Luckily, they already have a lot of music available without my music, so it probably won’t be that much of a problem.

    On the road, I mainly use Apple Music. They have most of my music matched, but I typically just listen to the music via the subscription service.
     
    sunspot42 likes this.
  24. Gaslight

    Gaslight ⎧⚍⎫⚑

    Location:
    Northeast USA
    I haven't used Amazon's offering in a few years now, but back then I had purchased a low cost yearly subscription (their version of OneDrive) and all the files I uploaded to them were in fact uploads, not matches. I checked this via an upload / download / check tags / file sizes / md5sum. All the same.

    Obviously a moot point in this case. OneDrive also does uploads only, no matching. Not sure what Google Play does today but they were uploads only with their initial offering.
     
  25. Scopitone

    Scopitone Caught the last train for the coast

    Location:
    Denver, CO
    That's how Hulu does it with video.
     
    Jking3002 likes this.
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