Amazon Music Importer

» see amazon.com/gp/help/customer/display.html as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the goodbye ~

amazon music importer's peak overlaps with my winamp and foobar2000 era, but the tool was locked to us amazon accounts at the identity layer. i was running a local library across an external drive and a laptop, without a us amazon.com login. the entire amazon cloud player stack, including this uploader, was invisible to me from ankara. i knew of it only as the amazon.com equivalent of google play music manager.

the importer was an adobe air desktop app. you pointed it at your itunes or windows media player library folder, or at a plain folder of mp3 and aac files. it scanned filenames and tags and pushed the eligible tracks up to amazon cloud player storage in the background. cloud player then streamed them back through the web app and the mobile clients for anyone who had bought into the amazon media stack.

that combination existed to solve the same problem google play music manager solved. streaming catalogs in 2012 did not yet cover everything. people had years of ripped cds and downloaded mp3s that they wanted playable on new devices without carrying a drive around. every big platform of the era wanted to be the destination for that upload. apple did it with itunes match on the paid side. google and amazon each ran their own installer on the free-storage side.

~ the chronicle ~

~ what it actually did ~

the ux was minimal in a way that made sense for a background tool. the installer put an air runtime in place, the app scanned your library on first launch, and after that it lived as a taskbar icon that watched for new tracks and pushed them up. cloud player storage started at 250 songs free, expanded to 250,000 songs for paying customers under the cloud player premium tier, then shifted to the amazon music imports pool with different pricing over its four-year run.

what the tool did not do was any of the smart matching that itunes match introduced. it uploaded actual files. if you had a poorly ripped mp3 with dead air at the end, your cloud copy had the same dead air. amazon added catalog-match features later on the server side but the importer itself was a dumb uploader by design.

~ why it went away ~

by october 2015 amazon prime music had been around for over a year, and the amazon music for mac and pc desktop app had grown into a full player rather than a companion. that main app had already absorbed the upload button as one feature among many. keeping a separate installer alive to do only the upload piece stopped making sense.

amazon told existing music importer users to switch to amazon music for mac and pc, where the drag-and-drop upload flow lived in the your library tab. the standalone importer stopped receiving new downloads on 7 october 2015. installations already on machines continued to function for some time afterward, but the download page went away and support quietly evaporated.

~ what got buried ~

the buried thing here is not really this tool. it is the whole idea that big cloud-services platforms would let you upload your own audio files to them. amazon retired uploads entirely in january 2019, three years after killing the standalone importer. google play music manager followed play music itself into the youtube music dead-file heap in 2020, where youtube music kept an uploads pool with a much tighter cap and itunes match got quietly folded into apple music as a background matcher.

the amazon music importer is the small clean example of that transition. a dedicated adobe air installer whose only reason to exist was pushing your ripped cds into someone else's cloud. by the time the installer went away, most of the ripped cds it existed for had already been re-encoded into whatever streaming catalog you paid for. the upload gesture stopped being something anyone missed.

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