I purchased the Premium Cloud Player from Amazon last night after reading about it on CNET. http://news.cnet.com/8301-1023_3-57483608-93/amazons-cloud-music-service-gets-scan-and-match/ . They claim to be able to scan and match your existing music from ripped CDs, iTunes, LPs and other sources and replace them with 256 kbps audio which you can download. Amazon claims a library of 20 million tracks and for their $25 fee you can have a library up to 250,000 songs on their cloud service. I did a test of some of my music. My library is over five thousand songs. I randomly picked some for uploading. Here are some preliminary results.
As you can see, the service does not match all tracks. All the above were ripped from CDs that I purchased. Miss Angie and Dan Peek are on available for purchase as MP3 downloads. Both CDs with all tracks are listed for sale as downloads on Amazon. Some Donna Summer and 2nd Chapter of Acts tracks are available on the site but not all.
The next issue is, are the cloud tracks that they matched their regular bit rate or the 256 kbps audio that they advertised? What about LPs that I recorded? Are they replaced by the super audio files that are advertised or is the program just uploading the ones that I made?
Stay Tuned…