Amazon has made its successful entry into the music streaming world with Amazon Cloud Player. Rather than stream a library of predetermined music (e.g. Pandora, Spotify), Cloud Player lets you upload your existing music library and stream it from any computer or Android device.

    Here are some tips about Amazon Cloud Player and its companion Android app:

    Uploading: When you first install Cloud Drive on your computer, it searches your entire hard drive for your music and your playlists. While this takes a while (10 minutes), once the process is complete, it makes uploading songs a snap*.

    Usability: The Web-based Cloud Player is really intuitive. The layout makes it easy to select songs, search your music archives* and organize your music. The player itself is quick to load, responsive, and even lets you skip around to different points in your music, something not possible with most of the streaming music players on the market today.

    Music quality: Playing music from your hard drive is going to give you a better acoustic experience, but the vast majority of consumers won’t be able to tell the difference.

    Features: Cloud Player doesn’t have a lot of frills*, but you will be able to do almost everything you want within it. It doesn’t have iTunes’ ability to automatically download podcasts or Genius recommendation feature, but they’re not necessary features for a great music experience.

    Android: You can use Amazon’s Cloud Player app on an Android smart phone. After signing in with your Amazon account, it will quickly find your uploaded music and play it flawlessly*. You will be able to skip around to different points in your music, create playlists and search your Cloud Drive for uploaded music. The player even lets you access your on-device music.

    Price: You start with 5 GB of free storage. From there, the pricing plan is very simple: 1 GB per dollar.

    Amazon has set a high bar for cloud-based music streaming. Apple and Google, which are expected to launch their own cloud players sometime this year, will have to match Amazon on usability and price if they’re going to compete. (SD-Agencies)

    (SD-Agencies)