Now I Love Amazon Even More

There's a reason 90% of all my non-food purchases come from Amazon.com. The company is just flat-out amazing.

Amazon just launched an auto-rip service that puts MP3 copies of songs into your Amazon cloud storage when you buy CDs. The auto-rip service goes back 15 years. That means I didn't have to manually rip all those CDs I own into my cloud after all! I have a premium cloud account and I have Amazon Prime, too. My premium cloud account is $25 a year and I get storage for something like 250,000 songs. Even major collectors can agree that's a ton of space.

In case you're wondering if this is legal, it is: Amazon has a special licensing deal with major labels to allow this auto rip process.

50,000 auto-rip titles are currently available and more will be added. So it's a process, and if you have something obscure it might take a little time to show up in your cloud. When the music is in the cloud, you never have to worry about losing it. Everything is neatly organized, the way you choose.

Right now, auto-rip is only open to folks living in America. Auto-rip is also available only for albums sold by Amazon.com. It does not apply to the same products sold by other sellers.

For audiopphiles: the bit quality is 256kbps.

Comments

[bkallday]

Cool story but I enjoy my free downloading. It's $0 each yr! Lol

[MZipper]

This is pretty slick, automatically imported my old purchases when I launched the player first time. Great White, Tesla, Shinedown, Slash... good start :)

[GNR]

What about a best of 2012 "singles" list ?? From albums that came out last year. Nominations ? Maybe not an album that made your lists but an actual kick ass song from last years crop or one from the albums.

I need a new CD to spin around the old car or a new playlist for the ipod purely driven by those that post on this board.

How many songs can we squeeze in 80 minutes of music of pure BBG ?

[Metalboy!]

GNR, I put up MY list in Comments on Al's post, "Top 10 of 2012 -- The Editor's Take", dated December 28th.

I've reprised it here...

METALBOY'S TOP 10 GREATEST SONGS OF 2012

10) MOTLEY CRÜE "Sex"
9) DE LA CRUZ "Rockin' All Night"
8) VAN HALEN "She's The Woman"
7) FOXY SHAZAM "(It's) Too Late, Baby"
6) HARDCORE SUPERSTAR "One More Minute"
5) MISS CRAZY "Make It Go Away"
4) WILDSTREET "Easy Does It"
3) CRASH DIET "Cocaine Cowboys"
2) BLACK VEIL BRIDES "In The End"
1) KISS "Hell Or Hallelujah"

[Metalboy!]

Also, you'll find killer songs to add from these other acts' 2012 releases, including many mentioned on other's lists on here...

1) Sister Sin
2) Cyanide 4
3) Diemonds
4) Wigwam
5) Eclipse
6) Casablanca
7) Pompei Nights
8) H.e.a.t.
9) Imperial State Electric
10) Sister Sin
11) Julian Angel's Beautiful Beast
12) Badmouth
13) Bullet
14) 77

Guys, please add whatever I forgot!

[BatLizard]

Hey Allyson, keep an eye on this new service, at least for some time, until all of the kinks are worked out. It appears that even if a particular CD purchase is available for auto-rip, some specific songs on that same title may be prohibited. I'm pretty sure that this "problem" is related to licensing/publishing barriers. As an example, I purchased the new John Corabi CD and only 6 of the 13 tracks were transferred to my cloud account. I had a similar restriction occur with the new Testament CD also, where all but the first track allowed auto-rip. Although this new service has potential, Amazon must figure out a solution that always allows auto-rip for an entire album. After all, people who still buy physical CDs want every cut, not an abbreviated version. For now, Amazon's selling point (auto-rip saves CD buyers the time and hassle associated with self-ripping and uploading) is partially deceiving, if many eligible titles do not provide an auto-rip MP3 of each corresponding track. I'm hoping the service gets better over time. Auto-rip is a stellar concept and Amazon is an outstanding company.

[Caddi]

The Amazon service sounds pretty cool, but Google Music cloud services offers a similar service for free. You have to upload your MP3 songs to the cloud from your desktop computer. The benefit is you can store up to 20,000 songs for free and even re-download them to your pc if your pc ever crashes. If you have an android phone, you can stream all yours songs to your phone using your data plan or wifi. It is nice that amazon, added your previously purchased albums to the cloud in MP3 format for you.