Amazon's Cloud service lets you access your music from anywhere

For years now, the most popular music system – Apple’s – has worked like this. You buy song files from the iTunes store. They download to your computer. If you want to listen to them on the road, you connect your iPod or iPhone to that computer and copy the files to it.

Amazon, whose online music store competes with Apple’s, has two problems with that arrangement. First, your music library is messily scattered. When you buy a new song at home, you can’t listen to it at work, anyway not without copying it manually. You might buy a song on your phone, however it won’t be on your computer until you do a sync. And if your music library is big, you can fit only a portion of it onto your phone.

Android phone

You can as well listen to anything in your music collection on an Android phone. No copying or syncing of music is ever required; all your songs are always available everywhere, and they don’t hog any storage on the phone itself.

The Cloud Player is a simple, clean, polished music-playback page that looks vaguely like iTunes. It’s dominated by a list of your songs, which you can sort and search. The album art shows up. You can drag songs into playlists. You can play back a song, album or playlist, complete with Shuffle and Repeat functions. You can download songs to your computer. Sound quality is excellent.

There’s a free Uploader app that lets you send your existing music files from your Mac or PC to that same online library, so those songs, too, are available from anywhere. The app is clever enough to preserve your songs and playlists the way you organized them in iTunes or Windows Media Player.

The app for Android phones is similar

The app for Android phones is similar. It offers two big buttons: one for listening to your online music stash, and another for playing the music files that are as a matter of fact on the phone. There’s no way to mix and match – to create a playlist containing some songs from each source, for instance.

Songs are pretty big files. That, when all is said and done, is one huge advantage of Amazon’s cloud idea: Moving those hefty music files to the Internet frees up space on your computers and phones.

The storage is good for more than music files

The storage is good for more than music files, even though. Part 2 of the Amazon announcement is the Cloud Drive, an online hard drive a lot like the Apple iDisk or Microsoft SkyDrive.

In other words, if you like Amazon’s online-storage concept, you might have a hard time coming up with reasons to shop Apple’s store.

— Amazon’s MP3 store is nowhere nearly as rich or full-featured as Apple’s.

— There’s no Cloud Player app for the iPhone, iPod or iPad – only Android phones. Nobody’s saying specifically why there’s no Amazon music app for i-gadgets, however it might have something to do with that fact that Amazon’s system competes directly with Apple’s own store and software.

— The Amazon Cloud Player is coming out at precisely the wrong time in the great timeline of cellphone computing. The age of the unlimited data plan is rapidly ending; AT&T eliminated its “all the Internet you want for $30” plan, and Verizon’s similar plan will end before long. Music files eat up your limited monthly data allotments quickly, so don’t think that Amazon Cloud Player means you’ll be listening to your tunes while daily hourlong hikes. Listening to your music collection on your phone is something you’ll want to do primarily when you’re in a Wi-Fi hot spot.

— You’ll have no music when you’re in the subway, on a plane without Wi-Fi or anywhere else there’s no cell service or Internet hot spot.