Here’s something from Pink Floyd’s Meddle that I really liked in high school (yes, in 1971), but I wasn’t as impressed with the rest of the album, so I didn’t buy it. Amazon has it on MP3 for only six bucks so, what the heck, I did a 1-click purchase a few minutes go.
Amazon Cloud Drive and Player
I’ve been an Amazon.com customer since July, 1996, and have never gotten around to signing up for iTunes. For the past few months I’ve been playing with Amazon’s S3 cloud storage service. It works fine for streaming media for embedding audio and video on the site. Today, Amazon introduced a new, consumer-oriented, service called Cloud Drive. It includes an online MP3 Cloud Player.
Amazon says that MP3’s bought on the site don’t apply to the 5 GB free limit, so the first thing I did was buy an album (for only $5), and that automatically kicked up the first year’s free limit to 20 GB. And, indeed, the 75 megabytes used for the files didn’t register. It would have been nice if my previous purchases were included as free storage, but Jeff Bezos isn’t that generous.
I uploaded a bunch of MP3’s, and gave the player a try. Gizmodo said there are some “jitteries” in the sound, but so far playback has been perfectly smooth. The Cloud Player’s volume control works in Firefox, but not in Google Chrome. Haven’t tried IE 8 yet.
An upload application is needed if you want to grab an entire music collection and/or folders. Using the Cloud Drive web browser page, folders can be created and songs uploaded.
Downloading files from a Cloud Drive uses the same AMZ format seen in Amazon’s MP3 store, and it invokes the download app. I can’t say how much better/worse this is than iTunes, because I don’t use it.
My big complaint is that the only choices for the Cloud Player are a web browser or Android. To make this useful for me, Amazon needs to hook up with Logitech to put Cloud Drive on Squeezebox. Logitech doesn’t offer online storage, so this would be a perfect hook-up. The Roku player has Amazon Video on Demand, so I’d like to see the Cloud Player there.
Follow-up: restarting Chrome got the volume control working.
She makes me laugh
This weekend our family video viewing was Rocky, a movie that Eric was interested in seeing. I told him it’s one of the quintessential movies of the 70’s, and Carol said, “You can tell it’s the 70’s, because Rocky’s wearing bell-bottom sweat pants.” Carol has a very good sense of humor.
Service interruption
Bluehost says they’re moving servers tonight and they expect the site will be down for 1-3 hours.
Broken breaking news
The BBC clears up any confusion you may have about the making of TV news features…
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YtGSXMuWMR4
White man’s jungle
Another act from the enjoyably eclectic “Bob Harris Saturday Night” playlist is Australian C.W. Stoneking.
I hope Bob Harris has another, similarly mixed show coming up on BBC Radio 2. And I’m looking forward to the possibly probable return to Boston radio this spring of one of my favorite DJ’s, Barnes Newberry. A song that Barnes liked to play on his Highway 61 Revisited radio program is this one, by Leonard Cohen.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vZ61su9H5RU
I first heard this on the old WBCN at least 40 years ago, and only its use of my sister Marianne’s name kept me from fully embracing it. Later, I would mentally substitute another, similar sounding, name and that gave it meaning.