Five Services That Can Move Your Music to the Cloud

PC World - Major technology companies, including Amazon, Apple, and Google, are lining up alongside smaller service providers to help consumers store and stream their music collections online. Whether you want to listen on your PC, your tablet, or your smartphone, you can find a number of online services that cater to your particular needs.

Accessing your music online is particularly ideal on mobile devices since many handsets and tablets have constrained storage space of 16GB or less. And with Wi-Fi becoming ubiquitous, having your music collection available to you online lets you access songs from more locations than just your hard drive at home.

If you're ready to let your music "reach for the cloud," here's a look at five new and not-so-new services that let you sync, stream, and download your music on your PC, your mobile devices, and even your television's set-top box. Some services require you to upload your music, while others will match your files with an online catalog, no uploads required. And one original service lets you ship your entire CD collection to a remote storage facility in the Midwest, where somebody else will digitize your entire collection for you.

*Amazon currently has a limited-time offer that allows unlimited music storage plus 20GB of Cloud Drive storage for $20 per year. To be eligible for unlimited storage, your music must be in MP3 or AAC format. Music in lossless formats, including .m4a lossless format, are not eligible, and each track file must be less than 100MB.

Amazon Cloud Drive and Cloud Player

Cost (for both Cloud Player and Cloud Drive): 5GB of free storage (about 1000 songs); an extra 20GB to 1000GB costs from $20 to $1000 per year.

Works with: Most major Web browsers; two native Android apps, Amazon MP3 (Android Market) and Cloud Player for Android (Amazon Appstore for Android); iOS via the Cloud Player website.

Pros: Free storage for up to 1000 songs; integration with the Amazon MP3 store; you can upload other files as well as music to Cloud Drive; one setting automatically downloads MP3 purchases to your devices.

Cons: Uploads required; no native app for iOS; support for other mobile devices (BlackBerry, WebOS, Windows Phone 7) is limited.

Thoughts: Amazon's approach to cloud-based music listening requires two pieces--Cloud Drive to store your files, and Cloud Player to stream them. Similar to Google Music Beta, Amazon's Cloud Drive and Cloud Player require you to upload all your music files to the company's servers.

You can upload files through Cloud Drive using your browser, or download the upload utility through Cloud Player (Mac and PC only). Even though you're moving your music to the cloud, if you want to retain a copy on your PC, you can adjust your Cloud Player settings so that any purchases from the MP3 Store automatically download to your computer.