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On July 1, 1979, Sony Corporation began selling the world's first personal stereo device, the Walkman. The original Walkman was a handheld, battery-powered cassette player with stereo headphones. As simple as it was, the device revolutionized the way people listened to music. If you had a Walkman, you could take your favorite tunes with you anywhere in a small, lightweight package. For several years, the brand name Walkman was as popular as the name iPod today, being as synonymous with personal stereos as Kleenex is to facial tissue. As technology progressed, so did the storage capacity of the media used in personal stereos. Audio cassettes only held up to two hours of music, and CDs about an hour and a half. With the invention of new digital file formats like MP3, the next logical step for personal stereos was storing and playing music as digital files the same way you would on a computer hard drive. In 2001, Apple released just such a device: the iPod.
In its first ten years, iPod models went from 5 GB to 160 GB in capacity, letting you store days worth of music on a single, small device. Some manufacturers have produced players that use removable media such as SD cards. This eliminates the need to repeatedly upload and erase files; you just switch out the card when you want different music. Unfortunately, the cards, like iPods, can still only store so much at one time. Now imagine that you could store all the music you have now, plus all the music you'll ever buy, as MP3 files, and that you'd never have to worry about whether you have enough space to store your whole collection. It's like having an iPod with an infinite amount of storage space. You'd never had to remove old files just so you can add new ones. Cloud computing is making such seemingly infinite storage a reality for all kinds of computing uses.
The Amazon Cloud Player is focusing that cloud power for Internet-connected personal stereos. The Amazon Cloud Player lets you lease disk space from Amazon's cloud to store your music and other files and to access them from anywhere. The first 5 GB of storage is free, and mobile devices with the Amazon MP3 Player can stream music online so you can listen to it straight from the Internet instead of downloading it to your device. This article describes how Amazon Cloud Player works, including the Amazon Cloud Drive powering it, and some of the challenges Amazon is facing in offering its downloadable MP3s and streaming services from cloud storage. In that time, Amazon devoted entire divisions of its growing company to developing the computing infrastructure behind the website, including massive storage services. Amazon Web Services (AWS) offers businesses an alternative to investing thousands of dollars in computer hardware and staff to run it.
With AWS, those businesses can store data and launch server computers in a cloud computing environment, and only pay for what they use. Our article "How Cloud Computing Works" explains that a cloud is a network of computer resources available to perform tasks both large and small. Using the power of those same cloud resources, though, Amazon has developed new products you can use for both play and work. The Amazon Cloud Drive is the storage service behind those products. With the Cloud Drive, you can upload files to the cloud and organize them via a user-friendly interface. It's like having a USB flash drive that's accessible from anywhere on the Internet. The only software you'll need to use your Cloud Drive is a Web browser running the popular, free Adobe Flash software. Amazon Cloud Drive isn't without its competition, as you'll see later in this article. For now, though, let's look at the application Amazon has developed to deliver music from the Cloud Drive to your ears: the Amazon Cloud Player.
We'll look at the Amazon MP3 Player later when we explore how you can listen to your music from your mobile device. First, though, let's look at the Amazon Cloud Player which lets you upload, organize and play the music files on your Cloud Drive. If you decide to upgrade to have more storage, you'll also need to add a form of payment to your Amazon account settings, such as a credit card. A supported Web browser -- Supported browsers as of this writing include Internet Explorer 8 and up, Firefox 3.5 and up, Chrome, and Safari. Adobe Flash Player -- Your browser might already include Flash Player software. Once you've met these requirements, your next step is to ensure any files you want to upload and play in the Cloud Player are in one of the player's supported file formats. One of the reasons Amazon is using these files formats is because it doesn't play music that's protected by digital rights management (DRM).
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