Gadgetory

storing and streaming music from the cloud is a nice alternative to storing it locally on your phone or computer it gives you more storage space on your devices and allows you to access your music from anywhere but when Amazon launched its cloud drive and cloud player it gave I Oh s users no love I'm Sharon Vaknin for cnet.com with a guide for iOS users who want to string music from the cloud when Amazon's Cloud Drive and player were first announced we quickly figured out that even though there isn't a dedicated app for iOS you can still stream music to your iPhone iPod or iPad it's sort of clumsy but here's how it works head to amazon.com / Cloud Player you'll be warned that your browser is not supported but you already knew that hit continue and you'll see the cloud player dashboard to play a song tap it and hit the blue arrow on the right you'll see a drop-down menu select download and safari will open the song with QuickTime the first time you do this Amazon will ask you to get the mp3 download err your song will start playing and will play in the background if you exit Safari which is fine but as you can see you can't skip songs save them or do any of the cool things that the Amazon mp3 app for Android can personally I would skip this option it's too sloppy and I can't find any practical use for this method instead I use sugar sync a similar service which is actually iOS compatible like Amazon Sugar Singh gives you 5 gigabytes of storage for free but the best part is that for every friend who signs up for sugar sing through referral you made you get 500 megabytes of extra storage to keep forever and there's no maximum right now the promotion is only offered until May 31st 2011 so now's the time to start spamming your friends to set up the cloud go to sugar sing calm and hit try sugarsync free you'll see several pricing options for now let's get the five free gigabytes of storage by scrolling down and hitting sign up next to the fine print after that follow the sign up and download instructions and get sugar sync on your computer once it's there open the sugar sync file manager to add music to your cloud hit ad sync folder and select all the folders you want to sync if you have iTunes you can choose to sync your entire iTunes library if it fits now download the sugar sync app on your iOS device once you're signed in open the icon for your computer you'll see all the files you backed up to your cloud to stream your music just open a folder and tap a song if you're on slow connection it'll take some time to buffer sugar sing supports multi tasking so music will play even when you exit from this player window you can skip songs within the folder so if you want to be able to skip through all of your music make sure to put all your files into one folder unlike the Amazon mp3 app there's no support for playlist creation or shuffling but according to SugarSync these features should be coming soon remember you need to be connected to the Internet to stream music from your cloud but if you know you'll be offline cache songs by tapping the arrow next to a file and selecting sync to iPhone SugarSync is my chosen alternative to Amazon Cloud Player but Dropbox can offer you a similar deal the difference is that you only get two gigabytes free and the app won't let you skip songs in other words it's pointless for media streaming but if you're stuck on Dropbox you can download a $2.00 app called boxy tunes it lets you skip songs create playlists and cache your library at this point sugarsync and Dropbox are probably your best bet for streaming music from the cloud but since the Amazon mp3 app would directly compete with iTunes and the fact that Apple is rumored to be developing its own cloud service it might be a while before we see it an Amazon Cloud Player show up in the App Store if you have any how to request of your own email them - how to at Zenit com4 CNET I'm Sharon Vaknin and I'll see you on the interwebs