Amazon Cloud Player adds automatic song match and upgrade feature like iTunes

Amazon unveiled a pretty major update to their Cloud Player service that launched early last year. The update makes the Player more independent from Cloud Drive and offers a free, automatic audio quality upgrade, similar to iTunes Match.

The audio upgrade program is pretty neat – music on your hard drive will be scanned and matching songs (that Amazon has the rights to) will be upgraded to a high-quality 256Kbps version and they won’t even have to be uploaded. That will work on songs already in your Cloud Drive (plus you can access the original files).

From now on, when you buy a song from Amazon, it will be automatically be imported into Cloud Player too. Songs you’ve purchased previously will be imported too (again, if Amazon has the rights to do so).

You can now manually edit track metadata, but you can also just use the data provided by Amazon for your imported tracks.

Music used to be stored in Cloud Drive but now the Player will use separate dedicated storage. Your current tracks will be moved from Music in a folder called “Archived music” and won’t count towards your storage quota, which is nice.

Speaking of storage, you get room for 250 tracks for free or up to 250,000 with a Premium account (it costs $25 a year). Cloud Drive users will soon be upgraded to Premium for free. By the way, those limits are only for songs you’ve bought from somewhere other than Amazon. Amazon’s own tracks don’t follow the imposed storage limitations.

You can authorize up to 10 devices to have access to your catalog – you can use any web browser (but only one at a time) or PC, Mac, Kindle Fire, Android phone, iPhone and iPod Touch.

Amazon announced that Roku and Sonos devices will soon be added to the list of supported devices, as well.

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