A few years ago, I had a free trial of Amazon Music, but wasn't ready to make the commitment to the paid version. However, I had moved a ton of music up into Amazon Music.
When I didn't sign up for the paid subscription to Amazon Music, they moved all but 250(?) uploaded songs into my Amazon Cloud Drive. They neatly placed it into a folder called Archived Music.
Well, since then I've gone ahead and committed to the paid subscription for Amazon Music. However, most of my music isn't in my Amazon Music library, it's in my Amazon Cloud Drive. You'd think there would be an easy way to move it back, but I couldn't find one.
So, how to get my 10GB of mp3 files (that I painstakingly ripped from my CD collection) out of my cloud drive and into my Amazon Music library?
Unfortunately, there's a cap on downloads. Based on internet searches, it seems that you can only download 500 items at a time. So I couldn't select my entire Archived Music folder, since it had thousands of files.
Well, I couldn't find a solution online, so this is how I did it.
The music was arranged in the Archived Music folder by artist, so I first sorted by the folder names.
Then I selected the first 10 folders, and downloaded them. It was somewhere between 200 and 300 items, well under the cap.
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| Selecting and downloading artist folders from Amazon Cloud Drive |
The download arrives as a zip file called "AmazonCloudDriveDownload.zip".
Then, I selected the next set of artists and downloaded them. It arrived in my download folder as "AmazonCloudDriveDownload(1).zip".
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| How the zip files end up in your downloads folder |
I was able to get 4 downloads going simultaneously, and going from three concurrent downloads to four didn't seem to slow any of them down. I probably could have done more simultaneously, but I didn't push it.
Depending on my artists, and the bit rate at which I ripped the mp3 files, the zip files were anywhere between 200MB and 2.2GB. It took 21 downloads to get all the files. Not sure if there was any throttling along the way, by Amazon or by my service provider.
Once I got them all downloaded, I unzipped all the artist folders into a common folder. I wanted to make sure I didn't miss any artist folders, so I pulled up my local artists folders and compared side-by-side with the folders on the cloud drive. I did find that I had missed a whole download somehow, so I was glad I double-checked.
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| Comparing my local artist folders with those on Amazon Cloud Drive |
I was able to get all of them downloaded in an afternoon, on a pretty fast connection. All in all it was not as painful as I thought it would be.
Next step is to upload them into my Amazon Music Library. I'll let you know how that goes.
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