Amazon Cloud Drive
I won't even go into how INCREDIBLY arcane, counterintuitive, and shabby the whole Amazon Cloud Drive experience is. I won't discuss in any detail how much it looks like a few very junior engineers threw together a disparate set of utilities and marketing was given all of a week to put it all together.
In a valiant attempt to say something nice, I'll note that they did seemingly do a decent job with the music upload process (modulo the significant caveat at the end of this diatribe). It's arcane, it has a bad UI, and it is difficult to understand at first, but it does the job well once you get past all that.
Instead I'll focus on my experience trying to upload some large (~400MB each) ebooks in an attempt to free up some space on my poor Mac's overloaded HD. NOTE: I'm going to get tired of typing "non-music files", so when I write "files" just assume the "non-music" part.
The first thing I found is: it is nearly impossible to figure out how to get to someplace where you can upload files. There's the MP3 uploader, but that is just for music files (not just MP3s). And even that, if run standalone, tells you to run the web-based Amazon Cloud Player to actually select and upload files. The URL, once you know what it is, is quite intuitive, but finding it was still a bitch.
I then found out that the web-based uploader doesn't work with Chrome. How fucking difficult is it to make a simple file upload utility work with Chrome? It appears to do absolutely nothing client-side except throw up a file selection dialog.
So I reverted to Safari, selected a destination folder in my cloud, selected 19 large files from my local HD to upload, and there they were: "19 files (4.5 GB) ready to upload".
And there it sat.
And sat.
And sat.
I couldn't "push the button, Frank!" because there is no button. There is a "See upload details" link, but the only button it gives you after you've selected files to upload is a "Stop Upload" button. Which, BTW, I empirically determined doesn't mean "stop", as in "resume later", so much as "cancel completely". And which I also found, looks like it is stopping the upload, but when you are brought back to the top level cloud drive page it still continues to show the files "ready to upload". With no way to upload them.
After several tries, I gave up, only to come back a few hours later to find that it was finally starting to upload the first file. Which it did, although the file size it is reporting in the cloud is smaller than the local size. It appears that while the rest of the universe has decided for marketing reasons that a MB is 1,000,000 bytes, Amazon has decided that a MB is 1,024,000 bytes. Just to add a soupçon of extra confusion.
It refused to upload anything else. So I started over.
This time it uploaded another copy of the same file, naming it "filename (2)". I have no idea where "filename (1)" got to; it was MIA. It then uploaded a second file, then once again stalled.
So this morning (we're into the 3rd or 4th day now) I tried again, only selecting the 17 files not yet uploaded. And it has been sitting there saying the files are "ready to upload" ever since. It has been over an hour now. I have no way to force it to actually start uploading, and no way of knowing when or if it will ever start on its own.
At some point, if I can ever actually get the files uploaded, I'll have to figure out how to download them, and see if that actually works. I am not looking forward to that.
My advice: If you want to keep your non-DRM music in the cloud, and you don't mind having to have a good internet connection whenever you want to play it, then use the free 5GB (see huge caveat below). If you want to use it for anything else, wait until they polish this turd a little more.
CAVEAT: They actually offer free unlimited music space. I uploaded several GB of music, and my 20GB of space still showed 0% used. The catch is: I wasn't able to upload it until I upgraded from the free 5GB to 20GB, because the uploader assumed that all of the music being uploaded would count against my quota. So the uploader says, "Whoa! You need an extra 3.6GB of space to upload all this music!" But after you upgrade to pay for more storage and actually upload it all, it says, "Oh, that music storage is all free; you still have all your storage available."
I'm guessing you could get around this by doing incremental uploads, but ye gods what a pain in the ass that would be.
In a valiant attempt to say something nice, I'll note that they did seemingly do a decent job with the music upload process (modulo the significant caveat at the end of this diatribe). It's arcane, it has a bad UI, and it is difficult to understand at first, but it does the job well once you get past all that.
Instead I'll focus on my experience trying to upload some large (~400MB each) ebooks in an attempt to free up some space on my poor Mac's overloaded HD. NOTE: I'm going to get tired of typing "non-music files", so when I write "files" just assume the "non-music" part.
The first thing I found is: it is nearly impossible to figure out how to get to someplace where you can upload files. There's the MP3 uploader, but that is just for music files (not just MP3s). And even that, if run standalone, tells you to run the web-based Amazon Cloud Player to actually select and upload files. The URL, once you know what it is, is quite intuitive, but finding it was still a bitch.
I then found out that the web-based uploader doesn't work with Chrome. How fucking difficult is it to make a simple file upload utility work with Chrome? It appears to do absolutely nothing client-side except throw up a file selection dialog.
So I reverted to Safari, selected a destination folder in my cloud, selected 19 large files from my local HD to upload, and there they were: "19 files (4.5 GB) ready to upload".
And there it sat.
And sat.
And sat.
I couldn't "push the button, Frank!" because there is no button. There is a "See upload details" link, but the only button it gives you after you've selected files to upload is a "Stop Upload" button. Which, BTW, I empirically determined doesn't mean "stop", as in "resume later", so much as "cancel completely". And which I also found, looks like it is stopping the upload, but when you are brought back to the top level cloud drive page it still continues to show the files "ready to upload". With no way to upload them.
After several tries, I gave up, only to come back a few hours later to find that it was finally starting to upload the first file. Which it did, although the file size it is reporting in the cloud is smaller than the local size. It appears that while the rest of the universe has decided for marketing reasons that a MB is 1,000,000 bytes, Amazon has decided that a MB is 1,024,000 bytes. Just to add a soupçon of extra confusion.
It refused to upload anything else. So I started over.
This time it uploaded another copy of the same file, naming it "filename (2)". I have no idea where "filename (1)" got to; it was MIA. It then uploaded a second file, then once again stalled.
So this morning (we're into the 3rd or 4th day now) I tried again, only selecting the 17 files not yet uploaded. And it has been sitting there saying the files are "ready to upload" ever since. It has been over an hour now. I have no way to force it to actually start uploading, and no way of knowing when or if it will ever start on its own.
At some point, if I can ever actually get the files uploaded, I'll have to figure out how to download them, and see if that actually works. I am not looking forward to that.
My advice: If you want to keep your non-DRM music in the cloud, and you don't mind having to have a good internet connection whenever you want to play it, then use the free 5GB (see huge caveat below). If you want to use it for anything else, wait until they polish this turd a little more.
CAVEAT: They actually offer free unlimited music space. I uploaded several GB of music, and my 20GB of space still showed 0% used. The catch is: I wasn't able to upload it until I upgraded from the free 5GB to 20GB, because the uploader assumed that all of the music being uploaded would count against my quota. So the uploader says, "Whoa! You need an extra 3.6GB of space to upload all this music!" But after you upgrade to pay for more storage and actually upload it all, it says, "Oh, that music storage is all free; you still have all your storage available."
I'm guessing you could get around this by doing incremental uploads, but ye gods what a pain in the ass that would be.