Introducing Amazon Cloud Player for Windows Desktop

So this is interesting. For the past several months I’ve been clamoring for Amazon to release a Cloud Player mobile app for Windows 8/RT (“Metro”) and Windows Phone 8. Nothing on that front, yet, but today Amazon surprised me with a Cloud Player application … for the Windows desktop.

There’s no press release, but the Amazon Cloud Player for PC product page tells the tale. Here are the highlights:

Intuitive, innovative design. With Amazon Cloud Player for PC your music is the star. All your albums, songs and playlists on your computer and in the cloud are at your fingertips. 

All your music is automatically added. We do the work for you.  Simply launch Cloud Player for PC and we’ll add your iTunes, Amazon and Windows Media Player music for you. Now you can finally play all your music from one place.

Your music library is always up-to-date. Cloud Player for PC detects and adds new music to your library even if you bought it from iTunes or ripped a CD. Your music library will always be organized and up-to-date. 

I’m not honestly sure I like the look of the application—it’s kind of an old-school black and dark gray affair—but the big deal here, to me, and the one that puts it over the top compared to the previous, web-only solution, is that it lets you manage music downloads to your PC. This is, in other words, a classic Windows desktop version of what I’ve been asking for on Windows 8/RT (Metro) and Windows Phone. It also offers local playback of your own PC-based music, which should be interesting to some.

It’s not a full iTunes replacement in that store access triggers a web browser window. But this is very interesting indeed. I’ll try to spend some time with this application this week.