Amazon Takes Steps To Digitise Your Music Collection

When they're not offering you films to stream or potentially doing things with their tax bills, Amazon also offer, in my opinion, one of the best music download services on the internet for choice and ease of use. iTunes, the biggest, still feels faffy to me with too many pop ups and terms and conditions that change practically everytime I have to buy something. Sure, they may have the new David Bowie single which Amazon doesn't, but you have to pay 99p for the privilege.

However, Amazon is not perfect and their shift to the cloud player and the lack of being able to put music downloads into a basket and having to order them individually is possibly the most idiotic shopping decision since someone invented self-service check-outs and didn't provide stress balls within basket-throwing distance.

That said, they have taken steps to improve one element. I suggested to friends and family a while ago that, whilst you're waiting for a CD to be posted out to you, waiting several days for it to arrive, you can download a digital copy of it to tide you over. They won't lose out as you could just rip it and send it back when it arrives so having a digital copy after purchase is no skin off the shop's nose.

Though they haven't quite taken this, to me, logicial step, they have now made 50,000 tracks CDs elligible for a service they call 'AutoRip' (http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-20972027 - not quite the 'Amazon offers free copies of CDs' advertised on the BBC's Twitter feed) which will become accessible to anybody who has bought that CD from then since they opened their virtual doors back in 1998. Snazzy, and a feat of programming to bring all your CDs to you. As they appear on the cloud player - though not sure there'll be space on there for them all if you're a big downloader, though their 5Gb allowance means roughly 1250 192kbps track so it's not a bad number for most purchasers at 100 albums, but not particular for me - it might re-introduce you back to classic CDs in your collection that have been gathering dust for a while.

Of course, it's not a perfect system. Though they promise biggies like 'Thriller', 'Dark Side of the Moon' and '21' by Pink Floyd, Jacko and Adele respectively, I doubt they'll have lots of minor CDs on there. Plus, I think most people keen on digitising their music collection to their phone or mp3 player of choice will have done it already. I did all mine and my parents over a whopping fortnight a few years ago so the time saving will be worth it - even if it depends on what CDs you have purchased, and whether you purchased them from Amazon or some other purveyor of shiny metallic discs - but it will only be .mp3 quality, whereas from CDs you can rip at the more audio purist-pleasing .wav quality.

So it's not a perfect system but it's a step in the right direction for updating your music player quickly and easily and the back dating is neat. But I hope that they do it for new releases at the time of dispatch so you can hear your next album without having to wait for the local postie to pop it through your postbox.