Thursday, August 2, 2012

Tuesday Recap: Amazon Cloud Player Upgrades, The Daily Scales Back

It seems as if Amazon has waved the white flag of surrender against Apple's iTunes Match today, beefing up its Cloud Player service with a few features that sound awfully familiar to iTunes users. But hey, the more the merrier, and we're quite happy to have all of our Amazon MP3 purchases available for redownload just the same. While you wait for Cloud Player to scan and match your own music library, why not take in today's recap for this terrific Tuesday, July 31, 2012?

Amazon Cloud Player Adds Past Purchases, Scan & Match

E-tailer Amazon is stepping up its MP3 music game today, announcing upgrades to its Cloud Player service. Thanks to agreements with all of the key music labels (as well as 150 indie music publishers), Amazon is introducing the same type of "scan and match" technology used in Apple's iTunes Match (goodbye, uploads!), and those matched tracks will also receive a free high-quality bump to 256Kbps MP3. The new deal also allows previous and future Amazon MP3 purchases to be automatically saved to Cloud Player, which doesn't count against any storage you might be paying for. Tracks can be streamed to any web browser, Kindle Fire or iPhone and Android apps, with the Roku and Sonos players soon joining this elite club. Amazon Cloud Player pricing has also gotten a tweak, with free users allowed to import up to 250 songs, while Cloud Player Premium users can fork over $24.99 per year to import up to 250,000 songs.

The Daily Regroups, Cuts 29 Percent of Staff

We never like to report on folks losing their jobs, and today AllThingsD has brought us the unfortunate news that tablet news publication The Daily is putting 50 full-time employees on the chopping block. That amounts to 29 percent of the organization's staff, but the changes don't stop there. The onetime iPad exclusive is reorganizing its Sports and Opinion sections, which it claims saw the lightest traffic; partners like Fox Sports will now provide this content, while the standalone Opinion section has been given the axe. The tablet app is also ditching the extra work it's taken to be viewed in landscape, and will feature content in portrait-only mode from now on.

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