Where we last left off, I was finishing the sync of data to the Amazon cloud, and trying to figure out how to handle playlists.
Amazon has no facility for creating smart, or mixed playlists unless you do it by hand. I love the Genius playlists in iTunes and wanted them in Amazon.
After the data upload finished I ran the data sync again but this time against my iTunes library to see if it would see the playlists, and it did! But not without trial and error.
After the first inspection of the iTunes library, it showed some play lists, but only a few of them, and only a handful of songs: (Note that it shows only 5 songs in this playlist, a list that in iTunes has 75).
The green dots means that the tool initially matched that song to one in my Amazon Cloud already. So no duplicates.
I then realized the reason the Amazon app doesn’t see all the lists or songs is it only can match a list/song that is downloaded locally and not in iTunes Match. So I had to take my playlists and tell them all to download all the songs locally temporarily.
Once the songs were downloaded I re-ran the Amazon import tool and all of a sudden, I saw all the playlists and music!:
Soon after checking all the lists to make sure it matched everything, I had roughly 10 play lists sync up. Of the 800+ songs in those lists it only needed to upload 4 that for some reason it couldn’t match. Most of these were because there were multiple albums for an artist with the same song and it may have mismatched one earlier.
In the end if I want to add in Genius play lists in Amazon, I just need to take my music and generate a Genius playlist against it in iTunes and in a few minutes I can take that playlist and replicate it to Amazon. It’s not hard and doesn’t require iTunes Match meaning I can dump that service entirely.
Mobile App:
Conclusion about Amazon Cloud Player:
The service is great but does have some slight flaws. None of which as bad as the platform lock-in, and many of the issues I’ve had with iTunes. I will not be renewing my iTunes Match subscription!
Using the web app to play music is OK, I am getting used to it, but already closed my browser a handful of times and lost my music.
There could be an issue with the mobile app I need to check out today – if you sync all your music to this app and not the native Music app on a phone, can you still access it via many of the in-car music systems. I am thinking no.
The 2 step process to use iTunes to build playlists is a bit of a pain, but not terrible for how infrequently I build playlists.
Until Xbox Music, or Google Play get to be viable options this is my way forward.
More Xbox Music fighting:
I am going to be removing all of the Windows 8 Music apps from my devices. I tried yesterday to remove all the “matched” data from the cloud and failed. Tried as I might, all the data would show back up on the devices in a couple hours no matter how many times I deleted it. Done with that service until I hear people get fired for it, or they rebuild it from scratch.
Leave a Reply