Although there’s something to be said for the convenience of streaming music services, there’s also something to be said for enjoying music from your personal collection, especially if it involves rare or obscure stuff not found on the streaming services. If you want to be able to access your personal music library online—for example, if you want to play it through the Amazon Echo—you can upload all your songs to Amazon Music for access anywhere.
Update: Unfortunately, Amazon is shutting this service down on January 15, 2018. But if you upload your music now, it will stay available for streaming until January 2019, so do it now!
Amazon Music for iPhone Free. Free Amazon.com iOS Version 6.8. Refuses to allow me to download my music without installing the offline version. What the heck. Incredibly frustrating. Download the Amazon Music app for your iPhone. Use the following steps to download the Amazon Music app for your iPhone. Open the App Store. Tap the Search tab in the lower-right corner. Type 'Amazon Music' in the search bar and press enter. Tap GET next to Amazon Music.
RELATED:How to Use Your Amazon Echo as a Bluetooth Speaker
Sure, you could get your personal music pumping through your Echo by pairing your phone with the Echo via Bluetooth, but you won’t get to control the music with your voice, which is the whole point of the Echo in the first place. For most people, Google Play is probably a better bet for uploading your music—since it’s free for 50,000 songs. But if you want integration with the Amazon Echo, you’ll have to go with Amazon’s music service.
Unfortunately, you’ll probably have to pay up for that privilege. Dveryone gets storage space for 250 songs free with their Amazon account, but if you want to upload more than 250 songs, you’ll need an Amazon Music Unlimited account ($7.99 a month for Prime members, $9.99 a month for everyone else). The Unlimited account not only gives you access to tens of millions of streaming songs, but it also boosts your personal storage limit from 250 to 250,000 songs.
That said, any music you’ve bought on Amazon does not count toward that storage. That doesn’t just apply to MP3s, either—many physical media purchases on Amazon are eligible for their “AutoRip” service. This means that even if you got a CD or vinyl record in the mail, a digital copy of that album was probably automatically added to your Amazon Music collection (whether you realized it or not) and does not count against your personal storage quota. To see all your purchased Amazon music (including the AutoRip uploads), simply log into your Amazon account and look under My Music > Purchased in Amazon Music. Any music you see here you don’t need upload.
Convinced? Here’s how to upload your music. First, swing by the Amazon Music App download page and click on “Download Desktop App” to download a copy of the Music uploader for your operating system.
Run the installer. Once the installation is complete and the installed application has auto run, plug in your Amazon credentials and sign in.
Once logged in you’ll see an iTunes-esque interface with suggested music and so on, as seen below, with a toolbar off to the right hand side.
There, you’ll find a subsection of the “Actions” menu labeled “Upload (Drag & drop here)” and “Upload (Select Music)”.
Both are perfectly valid ways to send music to your Amazon Music cloud storage. You can drop and drop music files onto the upper button or you can click the lower button and manually select files or entire folders to upload using your operating system’s file explorer. We’ll take advantage of the ease of drag and drop now to send a piece of music history, the Fraggle Rockin’ : A Collection box set to the cloud.
Once the upload process has started, you can click on the button again to view the progress of the upload.
Once the upload process is complete, your songs will now be accessible both through any Amazon Music app on any of your devices as well as (and most importantly) through Alexa. You can now go to any of your Alexa-enabled devices like your Echo and issue commands like “Alexa, play [uploaded album name]” or “Alexa, play [uploaded song name]” and she will spool up the song just as fluidly as she would from a streaming service with a bonus—the bonus being there’s no “now playing [song name] from Prime Music” before your personal music, the song just simply starts.
The music is immediately accessible too (no scanning or analysis required). We issued the command “Alexa, play the Doozer Knitting Song” immediately after the upload process was complete and the song spun up, complete with a matching confirmation card in our alexa.amazon.com dashboard:
At this point you’re ready to enjoy your personal music collection through your Echo and with the full power of Alexa-driven voice control. Simply repeat the simple uploading process to add more music to your Amazon Music account and enjoy.
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Just read about Amazon’s new online music store that features millions of songs for sale without any digital rights management junk. Yeah! My question, before I jump in, can I access the store on my Mac, and if so, can I then put the new music into iTunes and thence onto my iPod?
You’re asking what is the most obvious question now that Amazon’s just announced and launched its much awaited AmazonMP3 online music store. As you’ll see when you read through this article, with millions of titles and pricing just a wee bit lower than the popular Apple iTunes Store (formerly the “iTunes Music Store”), Amazon might well be the first viable competitor to Apple in the online music space. And being able to sidestep the hassles of DRM is a splendid bonus that’s sure to please many thousands of people.
More importantly for people who have purchased non-Apple mp3 players just to find that the music you bought and downloaded from the iTunes Store ain’t compatible and there’s no way to legally convert it so you can listen to it on your device, this hassle does not apply to Amazon Mp3 downloaded music. Apple’s DRM strategy is pretty lame, actually, as I realize each time I plug one of my many iPods into a computer other than its “paired” system.
However, all isn’t tea and roses: One hassle with the Amazon Mp3 store is that it requires that you download and use its own download utility on your computer, similar to Amazon Unboxed, the online video and movie store sponsored by Amazon that hasn’t seemed to have taken off after receiving a lot of launch publicity. The download app itself is a good place to start, so that’s what I did, downloading the AmazonMp3 download utility.
The good news? According to the download information page, the Amazon Mp3 download tool “automatically adds your music downloads to iTunes or Windows Media Player”. Cool. Problem already solved! 🙂
But, uh, let’s go through the steps anyway so we can see how easy it is to work with the new Amazon Mp3 store anyway…
Doesn’t take long to download the utility, and now you’ll see this:
Launch it and you’ll see the dreaded “1.0.0” version number, which is always a tiny bit risky (or, hopefully, you’ll see something that’s been fixed and tweaked so it won’t be 1.0.0, meaning it’ll be more stable and bug-free):
Next thing you’ll find is that the download tool wants you to restart all your open Web browsers. Do that and it should be integrated into your online experience from now on, making shopping a breeze…
Once you reboot, you will find that the new installer is, well, installed:
Scroll down and you can see some of the dry humor of the Amazon team too. The suggested first test download? Energy, by The Apples in Stereo. I guess they couldn’t find a song called “Take That, Steve!” so this was the best option. Me, I would have suggested Stiff Competition from Cheap Trick. 🙂
I will resist buying any Cheap Trick, however, and instead buy a fun song from the talented Joe Jackson: Five Guys Named Moe
. The actual purchase block on the Amazon page looks like this:It confirms that’s what you want to do, adds the song to your shopping cart and blamo! starts downloading it, having charged you for the transaction without any further confirmation. I found it a bit jarring, personally, no “are you sure you want to buy this for $0.89?” or similar, but then again I also complain when programs ask me to confirm what I clearly want to do, so go figure. 🙂
Anyway, here’s what you see as it’s downloading:
Amazon Music
Seconds later it’s downloaded and you’re left trying to figure out where it is. As with many download apps, you might expect to see it on your Desktop, or perhaps have a new “library” window pop up, but neither is the case. However, not to worry. Click on the song in the download utility, then click on “Reveal in Finder”, which will then show the directory structure in play:
As you can see, Amazon Mp3 creates a new directory “Amazon MP3” in your “Music” folder, then organizes music by artist and album. Neat enough, but how to get it into iTunes?
It turns out that you don’t need to do anything because it already has been automatically added to your iTunes directory, as you can see when I look at my “Recently Added” playlist:
Download Amazon Music App For Mac
(Note also that “The Apples in Stereo” song Energy has been added too)
That’s all there is to it. Very nice, neatly organized, and, other than having to download a separate application for facilitating the transfer of music, darn easy. Well done, Amazon!
To add the newly downloaded song or songs to your iPod or Apple iPhone, simply drag the tracks in iTunes to the device’s “Library” and next time you sync, you’ll have it ready to play and enjoy. Shweet!
