I have all my music uploaded into Amazon Cloudplayer because I buy my music predominately from Amazon. On my computer, Cloudplayer works just fine, except at work where my docking station messes with my laptop’s sound. On my Droid 3 the Cloudplayer app works fantastically (other than my headphone port being broken). So when I wanted to get some work done in peace, I figured I’d give Cloudplayer on the iPad a shot. Major mistake.
There are exactly 4 reasons why Cloudplayer for iPad is a piece of shit, let me elaborate.
#1 – There is no App.
Not having a dedicated app sucks. Unfortunately, the iPad is not a real computer and basically requires that you have a dedicated app for any task you want. Especially since you can, with a dedicate app, get decent OS integration.
#2 – You’re forced to use Safari
It should be obvious now that if there is no Cloudplayer app, you have to access it via browser. It doesn’t matter if you’ve got a nice browser like Skyfire because Cloudplayer simply doesn’t work in it. Now, I’ve gone as far as I can to hide Safari on my iPad, so I really dislike having to go dig it up.
#3 – It’s glitchy as hell
I’ve only been using the iPad Cloudplayer for about 20 minutes and it’s already glitching on me. For example, sometimes it won’t load when you scroll. Most recently it’s stopped moving to new songs. So once you’re current song completes playing… you get to listen to silence. It’s little things like that which make it a bit frustrating.
#4 – When the iPad turns off – so does your music.
Fan-freaking-tastic. If I turn off the iPad (so I actually have some battery), the music stops. If I leave the iPad to idle off, the music stops. Now I’m leaving Safari open, so that’s not an issue. It simply will not keep playing if the iPad turns the screen off. So I have to keep the iPad within arms reach and poke the screen every minute or so. I could turn the idle off time way up, but that would kill my battery when I want it to idle off. If one leaves Aafari and then turns the iPad off, it works… sometimes. Once it worked fine, once the music volume was cut in half, yet another time it played for about 15 seconds and then stopped.
In summary – Cloudplayer for the iPad is totally, utterly and unequivocally useless.
What you say is absolutely true with regard to using Amazon’s “music player workaround” URL (not a program! a URL!) on the iPhone.
I can force it to play music sometimes, but it hiccups and burps in a dozen unlivable ways.
And this failure is not specific to my particular iPhone. …It’s DESIGNED to behave this poorly. (You know that warning we get that the CloudPlayer URL is not designed to work with the iPhone? Well, they really mean it!)
Is Amazon’s iPhone URL music workaround better than nothing? Yes, in one regard: I can at least get it to play a long playlist, and if I set that to run through its paces without touching it, it may work. But it’s an extremely punishing experience at best — and impossible to tolerate as a day-to-day music player. Sadly, I’ll have to begin migrating to Google Music now.
Do we know who is responsible for the lack of an iOS app? (Is it thanks to Apple, or thanks to Amazon?)
I suspect that the lack of app is probably on Apple’s side. I’d be really surprised if Amazon didn’t kick one out purposefully and lose such a huge market. They have to know that their own web player sucks on the iPhone/iPad.
There is almost no information on this topic, besides this blog, but I completely agree. It is incredibly frustrating to use the Amazon Cloud player using the iPad Safari browser. I wish there was a way to connect to my cloud drive via the Music player, and just play/stream the songs directly off the drive.
And I’m not switching to Apple’s cloud, simply because they’re selfishly preventing an Amazon from publishing a cloud player app, under the guise of Apple’s closed-source, competitive business model. I buy all my digital music on Amazon, and to transport it to another cloud or device is an even bigger annoyance than not having the service at all.
So we’re at a stalemate until Apple either changes it’s business model (don’t hold your breath) or Amazon updates their cloud player to fix the iPad-specific bugs (which could conceptually be accomplished by having the Cloud Player detect for Safari on iPad and somehow disable the iPad’s hibernation…the faster battery drain would be a small price to pay, in my opinion.)
I doubt the power drain would be any worse than say… Pandora.
I totally agree with the above comments. There is a way to let the iPad/iPhone go to sleep though. Just hit the home button to minimize safari on the iPad and let it go to sleep. The music pauses for a second and continues playing. It doesn’t stop when the iPad goes to sleep now!
Yes, I experimented with this a bit when I originally wrote the article. Sometimes I could get it to keep playing in sleep mode, sometimes it would play for a (seemingly random) period of time and sometimes it would just die. At least to me it was far too unstable to be worth futzing with constantly.
there’s no way to downgrade your baseband in any way
you can update to 6.15.00 if yours is made before week 28 of 2011