Well it's about time! Say good-bye to syncing your music with a USB cable connected to your Mac or PC. That's so 1999! Finally, there is a way to stream the music we own from the cloud onto all of our PCs, Macs and Android devices.

On Tuesday March 29th, Amazon introduced Amazon Cloud Drive and Amazon Cloud Player for the Web. This allows all of us to both create a digital locker for all types of files and more importantly, listen to music we own streamed through a standard web browser or Google Android device. This is a really big deal! Here's why.

If you buy music from iTunes, the songs you buy are downloaded onto your computer. If you want to listen to those songs on another computer or another device, you have to physically transfer them to that other computer or device. Amazon has a better idea. Why not store your music collection in the cloud (on-line) so that it will be accessible to you on any computer or Android device that can access the Internet?

No copying or syncing of music is ever required because all your songs are always available everywhere. And an added plus is they don't hog-up space on your computers or Android phones. Amazon Cloud Drive Player looks and behaves much like iTunes or Windows Media Player. You can sort your music by artist, genre, album, etc. You can make playlists that que songs up in the order you want.

Best of all is that the Amazon Cloud Player service is absolutely free. Amazon gives everyone 5 gigabytes of online storage space. That's enough space to store about twelve hundred songs. You can buy more space if you need it. Amazon charges one dollar per gigabyte per year for extra space. But you really shouldn't need to do that because Amazon is offering us a great deal. If you buy just one album from Amazon’s music store, your Cloud Drive gets bumped up to 20 gigabytes for the year — no charge.

You'll need an Android phone or device to stream music using your smart phone. The Cloud Player for Android is a new version of the Amazon MP3 app and includes the full Amazon MP3 Store and the mobile version of Cloud Player.

You can use the app to play music stored on your Cloud Drive and music stored locally on your Android device. Cloud Player won't work on an iPhone. And no, there's no app for that - yet.

Amazon got the jump on Apple and Google by being the first to offer a digital music locker service that allows users to store their music on the Web and then listen to their collections on computers with a Web browser or on Android devices. But both Google and Apple will soon be offering features similar to Amazon Cloud Drive in the very near future. There are rumors that Google has begun testing Google Music internally among its employees.

You can put any type of file on the free 5 Gigs of space Amazon is giving you. But only MP3s and AAC music files will work with the new Amazon Cloud Drive Music Player. Windows Media Audio files (WMA) won't work with Amazon's music player.

This is such a cool thing. Think about it. You've invested a lot of money on your music collection. O.K. so maybe it's backed-up with Carbonite or Syncplicity or somewhere else. There's no reason not to back-up your music on Amazon's servers for free especially since they're giving us a Cloud Player that will stream it for free.

Once you get a free account on Amazon, the software will scan your computer for MP3 and AAC music files and automatically up-load them for you to Amazon's servers so you can begin streaming them as conveniently as you would if they were there locally - on the drives of your Mac, PC or Android device. It couldn't be easier.

You can also use the 5 gigs that Amazon is giving you for free to back-up files other than music files. You could use Amazon's servers to back-up your entire Pictures Library, for instance. I not long ago wrote a long article about how to back-up your files for free in the Cloud (on the Internet) so I'll be updating that article to include Amazon as one of the places we can park our files online for free.

Here's a link to Amazon's new Amazon Cloud Drive Music Player so go see for yourself how cool this is.