Amazon Cloud Player Scan and Match

Taking a cue from Apple’s iTunes Match, Amazon recently launched its own similar service called Scan and Match. It will scan your PC and matched to Amazon’s catalog of eligible songs. The files are then streamed to your computer or device at 256Kbps MP3.

Amazon’s Scan and Match technology saves you a considerable amount of time, since you no longer need to upload all of your song files. It will scan for all music files on your hard drive, including your iTunes Library and Windows Media Player directory. Amazon will also upgrade lower quality files up to a higher quality 256 Kbps bit rate. This upgrade includes previously uploaded songs.

The service lets you upload up to 250 songs for free, and is $24.99 / year for the premium service which lets you store 250,000 songs.

Log in to Amazon Cloud Player. You’ll see the following message if you haven’t logged in to your account in a while.

Then on the Amazon Cloud Player page click Import Your Music.

You’ll be prompted to download and install the new Amazon Music Importer tool. This replaces the old MP3 Uploader utility. If you have the MP3 Uploader utility on your computer, when you start installation, click Replace.

Then, have it scan your PC automatically for all of the music on your system or browse for it manually. Most users will be fine by clicking Start Scan. But, if you’re like me, and have a complex music management system, you’ll want to click Browse Manually.

The majority of my collection is on my home server, and it lets me manually add that location to scan. I was able to do this with iTunes Match too, and I’m glad to see the option with Amazon’s Scan and Match.

Wait while your music collection is scanned.

After the scan is complete, it shows you the results of what it found. Click Import All or manually select the music to import.

Then wait while your music is imported to your Cloud Player account. The amount of time it takes will vary depending on the size of your collection.

Remember, it’s not uploading each track separately, but matching them to its catalog of over 20 million tracks. So, the process is much faster. I remember when I uploaded a few thousand tracks to Google Music and it took days to upload everything.

Another thing to point out is, Amazon Scan and Match supports a lot of file types. According to Amazon’s site, the following are supported file types.

• .mp3—Standard non-DRM file format (Includes Amazon MP3 Store purchased files)
• .m4a—AAC files (Windows and Mac, including iTunes store purchased files) and Apple Lossless files* (Mac OS only)
• .wma*—Windows Media Audio files (Windows only)
• .wav*—Uncompressed music files
• .ogg*—Ogg Vorbis audio files
• .flac*—Free Lossless Audio Codec files
• .aiff*—Audio Interchange Audio Format

After your songs are matched on Cloud Player, you can listen to them from your favorite browser on your computer. Kindle Fire or any supported Android or iOS device.

With the Amazon Cloud Player app, you can listen to your tunes from the cloud, or songs you’ve put on the local device.