Amazon warns you have 30 days before Music Storage files bloodbath Amazon says subscribers to its moribund Music Storage Service have 30 days to claim any song files they have stored on the service or lose them forever. The Bezos Bunch says that, on April 29, new subscriptions to Music Storage will be cut off and current subscriptions will be allowed to run out. When that happens, those who …
@Charles 9; Money trees? You should ask Theresa May about those. Once upon a time she told a greedy nurse (who'd had the audacity to complain that she hadn't had a pay rise for eight years) that there was no "magic money tree".
But miraculously, just three weeks later- after she'd botched an unnecessary election called solely to *increase* her majority so badly that she lost that majority completely- she was able to find £1bn to bribe the DUP with to keep her in power.
Truly, we can only assume that Saint Theresa herself found- or brought into being- some sort of magic money tree. All praise her!
@Jove; But since you didn't mention it, I assume you're okay with the fact she *did* spend $1bn of the public's money to bribe the DUP to keep herself in power?
That proves there *must* be a magic money tree, otherwise the only explanation is that she "borrowed or took that money from a more deserving cause".
Then again, saving Theresa May and her party from the results of our their incompetence is a far more worthy cause than the NHS, isn't it?
"NHS slackers" my arse, you two-faced hypocrite.
"I assume you're okay with the fact she *did* spend $1bn of the public's money to bribe the DUP to keep herself in power?"
I wish our politicians only bought votes a billion dollars at a time.
By the time the dust settles, buying votes, the 'green energy' fiasco, and trying to hide some of the damage caused by the Liberal government's 'green energy policy' for a few more years will cost Ontario something on the order of 100 billion dollars.
What the hell is more deserving than the NHS? Honestly? What. The health and welfare of the entire nation is beaten by what in your estimations?
However going off your rant you are either :-
A Always in perfect health and have no grasp of what the NHS is because you have never used it (Probably a miraculous birth as you didn't need their help back then)
B Have no family that have ever used it and have therefore never actually visited some place or seen an ill person require its aid.
C Devoid of emotion because any relative you have has been in a hospital and you didn't visit.
D Have private healthcare in which case - you have never needed an ambulance as they are not private but NHS, never needed 999 because they are NHS not private healthcare and not realised that private health care nurses and doctors are usually NHS trained or working two jobs, one of which is NHS based to keep their grades and certificates.
E No comprehension of what the NHS is.
F Tory who won't hear anything bad against 'cruella d'evil' herself, Teresa May. (Just don't mention the 126 million and rising in expense claims that the 600 scum waste on themselves.)
G A troll, a really bad troll, the kind that really needs to just leave forums alone for a decade or two. Perhaps visit adult mental health care where they can assess in an NHS institution your ability to function in todays society?
H A dick?
Vaguely interested minds want to know.
"isn't there ANY Co out there that just once, will start something AND KEEP IT GOING"
Long term, no. That's impossible.
Never store anything you don't want to lose on any server that you don't control. If you really want to use a service, go for it -- but be sure that you're keeping a local copy of your data, for when the service goes belly up. And remember that you won't always get advance notice of a shutdown.
" but be sure that you're keeping a local copy of your data,"
You also need the means to read the data. That is why the millennials will have the paradox of having taken more photographic records of their lives then previous generations - but will have then lost them.
There is no guarantee that the next generation of computing equipment will have the hardware/software to process the data.
Before digital cameras the saved image was from film - usually with a negative. Relatively speaking any individual only had a few spanning their life - but they have lasted nearly 100 years. They can still be viewed by eye - and transferred to a current storage format by scanning.
"but if you lose the ability to make a proper lens,"
It is difficult to see lenses becoming obsolete - unless cornea manipulation gives everyone 20/20 vision.
Lenses have been in use since the time of Galileo. Silver based photography was an invention of the late 19th century. The more primitive a technology - the easier it is to reproduce later - especially if the way to do it is documented.
Technology is a pyramid of gradual improvements in techniques and materials. Lose some of the intermediate steps and you are back to a more primitive society. One of Philip K Dick's stories was based on a post-apocalyptic society - where landfill sites were mined for discard equipment's transistors.
You also need the means to read the data. That is why the millennials will have the paradox of having taken more photographic records of their lives then previous generations - but will have then lost them.
There is no guarantee that the next generation of computing equipment will have the hardware/software to process the data.
Please explain. I have yet to find a camera format that open source RAW file readers have "forgotten how to read". Storage is constantly evolving and hence you will always have periods of overlap whereby you can transfer files, especially given how transfer rates keep improving - IDE -> SATA -> NVMe. I can still read data CDs and they went out of fashion a fair while ago. Therefore I fail to understand your comment regarding having a local copy but not the means to read it, it makes no sense.
Check out Domesday Reloaded... The BBC created a huge modern Domesday Book on laserdisc, a format which promptly failed to take off, and within 20 years the national archive was running a project to reverse engineer the files to get the data off. While I do have multiple local backups of everything, the advantage of the cloud is that the storage medium is transparent - I don’t need to know if it’s on spinning rust or SSDs as long as it works, and actually services like iCloud help with the multiple local backups - stuff just syncs across the phone, laptop, iPad. The same can’t be said for all the backups I have on Zip Drives :-(
"Therefore I fail to understand your comment regarding having a local copy but not the means to read it, it makes no sense."
I guess you don't know the actual history of data preservation in practice.
Most forms of storage are not archival quality. Almost all of them degrade over time, spontaneously. In theory the data can be copied, but that tends not to happen, and media failure or device failure cannot be predicted easily.
CDs may be readable, or may have failed in storage. Some people can find drives to read small (5.25 inch) floppies, but working 8 inch floppy drives are becoming rare. In some cases the programs required to correctly render the data back in human readable form are lost, unreadable themselves, or no longer supported by available architectures and operating systems.
Many tape formats are degrading, and the machines to read them may be broken... without any spare parts or trained technicians to restore them. I believe much of NASA's data is lost or being lost to this kind of problem.
Current estimates are that several percent of our scientific data is lost every year.
Unlike large organizations, most people do not have multiple backups constantly being propagated to new storage media, data formats, and machine architectures. It will be even worse after the person who took the images, or collected or generated the data, dies.
Papyrus lasted thousands of years, parchment many centuries, old papers centuries as well.
Most modern papers can't be counted on to last two centuries, and most data storage won't last more than a few decades at best, and can fail within a single decade.
I once had a chat with the archivists from the provincial archives, they flat out said that there was only one data storage medium (a very specific example of one sub-technology, not any roughly similar products) that had any archival value, and even then it couldn't be counted on for long term preservation like you get with parchment or papyrus or acid free paper. (or stone, or baked clay tablets).
Hmmm... I have some stuff on punch cards, and on paper tape. It is probably getting harder to find readers for those now, as well. And I know I have data that expects a long discontinued (35 years?) processor and OS to read.
If you are thinking of the era of writable CDs as significantly long ago, you are completely missing the time scale for data preservation. For historical and archival purposes, 'centuries' is a short time,
" I have some stuff on punch cards, and on paper tape."
We had a project in the 1980s to replace a real-time 3rd generation mainframe system from the early 1970s. Basically the requirement was to have all the advantages of a much faster mainframe - without any change to their customer interfaces.
It proved impossible to get mainframe connectable papertape readers/punches of the industrial speed and endurance of those commonplace only a decade earlier. The RS232 ones that were eventually sourced proved to need regular replacement.
Nowadays a photographic method of reading cards and papertape could be devised. It is hard to see that being able to transport the media at the phenomenal speeds previously achieved.
In the early 1960s our 2nd generation mainframe transcribed cards to tape offline quite slowly with electrical contact brush sensors. Within only a few years the card readers were online and optical sensors made reading a box of 2000 cards a matter of seconds - with the noise approaching dangerous levels. Regular engineer maintenance was essential - and often there were breakdowns in use requiring mechanical adjustments or repairs.
An old systems guy said that when he was an IT apprentice in the 1950s - part of his HND training was in metallurgy. This was considered essential knowledge when mainframe manufacturers also made their own peripheral devices to handle punishing duty cycles.
Couple of observations:
1. Amazon isn't the first "cloud" provider who has bailed out of "keeping your stuff safe", and it won't be the last. (Remember MegaUpload and Kim Dotcom?)
2. But that's the least of it. Try reading a MS Word 1.0 DOC file with a modern copy of Office! And that's only twenty-eight years. What about CP/M files from the early Eighties -- that's thirtysome years ago.
3. To put this in perspective, English legal history depends on readable copies of the Magna Carta -- and that's 800 years ago. Or cultural history depends on Chaucer's Canterbury Tales....and so on.
*
So.....will we be able to read current key documents (whether legal or cultural) in even 100 years time if we depend on Microsoft or DVD technology? The answer is a resounding "No"!
*
And lest someone opines that "We don't need to keep all this crap anyway", let me point out that we often don't know what is valuable and what is not until long after the authors are dead and gone.
"Try reading a MS Word 1.0 DOC file with a modern copy of Office!"
However, you can still do so by converting that file using any of a zillion converters that are out there.
"What about CP/M files from the early Eighties"
That's actually trivial. CP/M files (or even CP/M formatted disks) remain easily readable today.
"There is no guarantee that the next generation of computing equipment will have the hardware/software to process the data."
Technically true, but it's unlikely that this would be a problem in the time scale of a single generation. We can still read the computer tapes made in the 60s, after all -- and standard data formats are likely to be understandable for a very, very long time.
But an essential part of long-term backup strategies is to refresh your data periodically. All media has a shelf life, so you copy it all onto newer media every so often (I usually do it every five years or so). At that time, it's advisable to convert any file formats that look like they're fading to whatever it is that's replacing them (always keeping the original files as well, of course).
"That being said, isn't there ANY Co out there that just once, will start something AND KEEP IT GOING"?
Only if it's profitable and convenient for them. Not you.
That is something all consumers should make sure they understand thoroughly. Corporations are not in business for your good - indeed their profit inevitably comes out of your bank account.
That is something all consumers should make sure they understand thoroughly. Corporations are not in business for your good - indeed their profit inevitably comes out of your bank account.
And, so the age old addage remains... If your NOT paying for the Product, THEN YOU ARE THE PRODUCT BEING SOLD!
So with this in mind... Could someone please explain to me what the kerfuffle over Cambride Analyitca is again? Seems to me that Facebook had something to sell, and they were in the market for this stuff.
*No I'm not attempting to whiteknight for them. I'm just curious is all.
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I don't get it. I really don't get it. I have over 16.000 tracks of music stored locally. The original FLAC storage is on my X10, I have two (separate) local backup copies of the FLAC files and an additional two (separate) copies of the FLACs re-encoded to MP3 (so that I can use them on my portable MP3 player and in my car).
Now why on earth would I store any of that in any thrird party's storage facility. let alone one owned by Bezos?
People, I just don't understand them.
@charlie-charlie-tango-alpha
Absolutely! Why? Just why? Spotify (with ads) is great for exploring new music, but if I like it, I buy it. More often than not from eBay for a couple of quid. Rip, store and enjoy.
Although I have to admit that it's fun spotting who on the Tube has a music streaming account and just lost their Internet connection.
I'm the AC with the NAS4free box,
'Like Spotify, which is perfectly happy to download playlists locally to the device for periods of no mobile data coverage, for instance?'
Here's the thing, as I said in my post '..can stream them to my phone anywhere there's a decent phone signal if I need to..'
Spotify offering an (assumed) temporary offline cache tied to their service doesn't make any difference in my case, as well as streaming the files, I also have the capability to download music files directly to my phone from my server if i need to.
It's a bit of a moot point, really, despite having the capability to stream/download music to my phone, I don't normally use it to listen to music as I carry a mp3 player which has a combined (SD and internal) storage capacity of 72GB and from which I get about 20 hours continuous play between recharges.
Even if the mp3 player fails then I still wouldn't need to stream anything as my primary phone already has 60GB of music on a (currently) 128GB SD card, and if that fails, then my backup phone has 27GB of music on it's 32GB SD card, and, importantly from my point of view, all the music file transfers to these phones via WLAN, USB cables and card readers were done with no 'third party' gatekeepers, no adverts, no profiling of my musical tastes(sic) for automated marketing...oh, and no mobile data use.
'I don't get it. I really don't get it. I have over 16.000 tracks of music stored locally. '
Similar setup here, just over 36,000 music files locally resident on my NAS4free box, can access them @work and can stream them to my phone anywhere there's a decent phone signal if I need to..
Lots of people (myself included) don't have anywhere secure at their house to store stuff if, say, a fire happened. I'd be out a lot of stuff, except I thankfully use cloud backup solutions to not have to worry.
Plus, a lot of people aren't interested in manually managing the redundancy that you're doing...
FLAC source
FLAC backup 1
FLAC backup 2
FLAC mp3 backup 1
FLAC mp3 backup 2
No thanks. I have my music and the rest of my digital life on a RAID1. The music I bought from Apple I can redownload, the music I didn't buy from them is still backed up with iTunes Match. Plus stored at my cloud backup provider. My regular files are backed up with Time Machine to an additional hard drive, and also backed up "to the cloud".
That's far easier (to me) than maintaining 5 different sets files myself.
These sound like plausibe excuses, but not valid reasons for stopping it. They certainly don't have a problem affording the storage space. The clue is in the fact that Prime and Unlimited services exist. I presume these are their equivalents of iTunes and Spotify, so instead of uploading the tracks that you own, you now have to buy them again or pay for a subscription to listen to them, so Amazon gets a constant stream of money when you listen through these sevices that it doesn't get by simply offering you disk space. Plus the music publishers and record labels get their slice of the pie yet again, and presumably the musiians end up with a few pennies too.
The streaming and locked in "store" purchasing models are terrible really. Why trust any here today gone tomorrow cloud service with your music when you can store it yourself and manage it prefectly well without paying these companies yet more money? I laugh when people tell me "it's more convenient", as they've swallowed the advertising hype way too easily....... Plus the "unlimited" services are anything but that, despite the large number of tracks they have licensed.
I'm afraid my opinion differs, I recently bought the £14.99 spotify 'family' pack (5x Spotify subscriptions), I gave my business partner & his other half a subscription, my better half and myself also had a subscription and also to my grandma as she doesn't get about much and enjoys music.
That equates to £3 a month (Less than the cost of a single album). I listen to the service almost all day at work and also whilst doing service calls in my van. My music habits tend to be quite varied and in all honesty, If I were to purchase all the music I listened to (Even if I only ever listened to it once then never again) I'd have spent a phenomenal amount of money. I appreciate that I don't *OWN* the music, I am simply paying for access to the catalogue but that suits me well, just because it doesn't suit one persons ideology, others (Such as myself) may have a totally different view. £3 is about the same price you'd spend on a MoccaChoccaLatteFrappaChino from <Insert overpriced 'trendy' coffee chain here>.
Like it or lump it, almost everything is going subscription-based - Adobe, Office, Music, TV - I envisage a future where you won't be able to buy tracks and albums in the current way that we've been able to previously and subscription-based is the only way to go for future releases. I have to admit I can't remember the last time I purchased a physical CD and infact my most recently purchased vehicle had the CD player as an 'optional extra', even then it was relegated to hiding in the glove box!
It doesn't really matter how close you are to him, unless you all live together at the same address, its against the terms - as it explicitly states in big letters when you signed up for it and when you send an invite to someone.
If you think they won't work it out, you are underestimating how good their data science is.
That equates to £3 a month (Less than the cost of a single album). I listen to the service almost all day at work and also whilst doing service calls in my van..
£3 + internet access + maybe going over you data plan, say around £20 per month or £240 per year. How many CDs/song could you BUY with these money?
Data plan is a sunk cost because it was obtained for other reasons (say it's a listed business expense). And more plans have no data caps in order to keep customers. Sunk costs and no data caps takes out the two chief concerns. A "no need to listen again" takes out the main reason for downloading.
If we're going down that route, you can start factoring in how I dropped my TV license for Netflix.. that's £150/year better off. I also don't solely use my internet connection at home for Spotify, so a moot point. My data plan is 20GB (Of which streaming is actually not taken out of this allowance, bazinga!) and I don't solely use my mobile phone for Spotify.
The future of subscription based everything makes me want to wretch. Seriously.
I had Apple Music (and I still do turn it on from time to time, if I want to hear a bunch of stuff to decide what to buy), and even in the short time I had it initially, I kept adding stuff to my library, and then a month, two months later get greeted with "this song is no longer available".
This isn't an Apple thing.
Years ago, for a brief moment, the entire James Bond movie collection was on Netflix. I actually still watch them all at least once or twice a year, even if its just in the background, and was like "yes! I don't need these DVD's anymore, that's awesome!", and then sure enough, it all get taken down from Netflix, some re-appeared on Amazon.
On youtube, I'll see something i like, and find that hte owner took it down later on, or Google took it down at the request of something else.
Even more recently, It's Always Sunny was taken down from Netflix. I think it moved to Amazon or Hulu or whatever. So now, I need two subscriptions? No, I bought it.
Point is, by buying into these subscription services, we're forced to only be offered what's in each of theirs limited collections. Sure, they might seem vast, you only find out their limited AFTER they remove something that you thought you had and wanted. And then it'll hit you that you're paying perpetual license fees and you're not even sure if the content you want will be included in it...
" Sure, they might seem vast, you only find out their limited AFTER they remove something that you thought you had and wanted."
Amazon gave me a free month's trial of their Prime subscription. Looked at what came with it - and checked out the films in various categories. Nothing I wanted.
A bit like our local Public Library. It's good - if you only want to read the latest pot-boiler novels and celebrity outpourings. One book I was recommended was hard to buy - and had to be obtained via the Public Library interchange service. There was one copy in the UK - in a library warehouse somewhere. It cost me a relatively high fee for it to be extracted so as to borrow it for a maximum of three weeks.
I find more choice on the charity shops' DVD shelves - to add to my 2000+ collection. Lots of non-mainstream things there - and some are quite interesting.
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I'll doubt storage space is really their concern. Probably more that it's either not cost-effective to keep the service going, they don't have a more glamorous roadmap for it, didn't see the take-up they forecast, they're concerned about some aspect of regulation, or they simply can't be arsed any more.
This article is the first I've heard of Amazon's Music Storage service.
I mean, I know they sell MP3's and such but I had no idea you could store your own with them!
I guess in this case lack of users may be to blame if there are others like me who had no idea it existed.
But having said that, most of my music is in FLAC so I wouldn't have been able to use it anyway.
That makes me wonder. When I buy CDs from Amazon they also supply an MP3 rip online. Possibly those will now disappear? Not that I ever use them.
Edit: Autorips of purchased CDs are not affected.
"Note: These changes only impact music you’ve imported. Music purchased from Amazon (MP3s or AutoRip from CDs) remains securely stored for playback and download."
@AC; "When I buy CDs from Amazon they also supply an MP3 rip [..] Not that I ever use them."
Same here. I was informed- without asking- that I had those, even for CDs I'd bought some years prior. (#) Never used them either; anything I wanted ripped, I'd already done so.
(#) It's also notable that some of the CDs they did this for had been bought- and given away- as presents for other people, so I'd have thought I wouldn't have the "right" to the rip anyway?!
I am an avid user of the service. It's been around for a long time. It's allowed me to have one app for all of my music. Much of my music is not available on Unlimited, and using the service also allowed for the Echo to play it. Now that it's going away, I don't know how you get from a CD you own to streaming back if Amazon doesn't sell it to you again.
Definitely unhappy.
I know it's not for everyone but this is a techie website so here goes.
If you want your music available from anywhere, get a small server (a Rapberry Pi 1 is sufficient for this and uses very little power). Put a minimal Linux distro on it (I recommend Arch). Install MiniDNLA (a.k.a. ReadyMedia) and OpenVPN. Plug in an external drive with all of your media (unless it all fits on the internal SD Card) and point MiniDLNA to the right place. Now install the OpenVPN client on your phone (having opened up the relevant port on your firewall) and you will be able to see your MP3s on many MP3 player apps, wherever you are in the world (you probably want to use a fixed DNS service). You can give OpenVPN keys to your friends and family if you want so they can share your music. Nobody else can get to it; certainly not large corporations.
Anyone with reasonable Linux skills can set this up. It won't take more than a couple of hours of your time. I use my set-up for a lot of other things too (like backup) but the point is there is no need to give your data to someone else, especially if you have the competence.
Where did I say I hate Amazon? The only thing I really don't like about it is the fact that my wife keeps buying stuff and I have to go downstairs to answer the door when things arrive (unlike her I work from home). But hey, I use her prime account too. Oh yeah, I'm not keen on their tax dodging but they're hardly alone in that respect.
As for Joe stupid, they can do what they want. If they want to throw their money at shiny stuff and pretend they're computer literate then I'm not going to stop them. My post was aimed at the average user of this web site, who generally understand computers. I think I made that quite clear. If it's beyond your abilities them don't do it.
Or you could setup Subsonic on your NAS / Mac Mini / whatever, pretty easy to do even for non techies I would imagine. Can then also use CloudFlare to get it working over https for free.
http://www.subsonic.org - Not the best client interface but it works really well for me and you can use FLAC files if you wanted. The Android app has offline storage too.
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