Amazon Echo and Amazon Music Subscription

So with this hard drive SNAFU comes a hard lesson. I do have backups, but clearly not enough. I have another 5TB hard drive coming so I can sync my most important data to a second location. That will kick in on Tuesday night when the new drive shows up.

But it also got my thinking. I bought the new Amazon Echo and think it’s a pretty neat little device. I’ve had it playing all sorts of music since I got it and it does so quite well. I found all sorts of albums in the Prime Music Library and even uploaded a few of my own CDs to listen to. I can only upload 250 songs, which to be honest is quite a bit for me, but there is a second option to upload 250,000 for a mere $25 a year. At first, it didn’t really seem worth it. I have the discs and while it may take awhile to recover everything, why would I want it all in the cloud?

And then Echo showed up. I’ve wanted a simple way to stream music for awhile now and this is working out perfectly. The only stumbling block has been the music on a single system. But for $25, I can shove everything up to the Amazon servers and play it on Echo as well as every other device I have. Seems like a smart move. So I gave it a go.

The neat thing is, you don’t have to upload every song you own. As you use the music importer, if Amazon already has a digital copy of the song, it uses that. This significantly cuts down on the upload time. Pretty cool.

I just started going through my collection and will eventually get the most frequently listened to music up there, but it occurs to me, I don’t even have a fraction of the 250,000 song limit. I probably have 5,000 or so songs in my collection. And out of that, maybe 1,000 would be on tap to listen to on a regular basis. But this might not be bad. My whole collection will be up there and I can now see what sort of music is similar and perhaps discover some new albums and artists. Should be beneficial.

I will say the Amazon Echo is a pretty neat device. It has played "a lot" (relatively speaking) of music for me over the past week and I think the sound is pretty good. No, it’s not for crazy-eared audiophiles and no, it’s not meant to host your next party, but as a device to play music out in the living room, in the kitchen or near the gaming computer, it works great. Plus, Alexa is very good at setting the morning alarm and timers while cooking.

Under normal circumstances I don’t know if I would be so inclined to the Amazon Cloud Service, but when you combine Echo and my recent hard drive folly, it makes pretty good sense to me. I can stream all sorts of music and I get a backup out of the deal.

Let’s see how many songs I have in the next 6 months. That will be quite telling.