We’ve all been there. You’re mulling around the laundromat when you suddenly realize the thump coming from the dryer is louder than it should be for and handful of flannels and skinny jeans. Panicking, you pat your pockets in desperation, attempting to establish the whereabouts of your iPod. You swallow hard, swinging open the circular drum of the dryer and greet $399 worth of “Snuggle” scented electronics and your trashed music collection with a string of expletives.

Perhaps the only thing worse than losing the music collection you’ve cultivated is since 8th grade is the realization that you never backed it up and will have to shell for it again.  Fortunately for you, and all the other absent minded music lovers out there, Amazon has launched a new cloud player application that lets users store music and data in a hosted (and decidedly washing machine free) environment.

Already well established in the hosting space for their EC2 solution, with Cloud Drive Amazon has turned its attention to consumer oriented storage service that can be accessed from any Internet enabled device. The Cloud Player application will directly utilize Cloud Drive and give users access to their music from anywhere. Think iTunes, only you don’t unintentionally replace your music with the “Hall and Oats” discography if you sync your iPhone (News - Alert) to your parent’s computer.

After downloading the platform for my Droid handset, I was impressed first and foremost by the easy to navigate library style. This is basically an upgraded version of the Amazon music player with an additional utility that allows users to switch between their hosted and on-device libraries. The app went through and organized the music I already had on my Droid, displaying it with an intuitive presentation and a number of sorting options.

This is something I’ve always felt was sorely needed in the onboard media software for the Android (News - Alert) OS, and while there are a ton of 3rd party apps to fill this need, Amazon’s player certainly wasn’t broke, and certainly didn’t need a whole lot of fixing. But a decent media player isn’t what this is about; the real utility here is the cloud access the player gives users.

If you have an Amazon account, you have five free gigs on the company brand new cloud storage about platform right now. This space can use that for music, videos, documents and any other information format. You can upgrade as needed, paying a dollar a gig per year, with expansion available all the way up to a terabyte.

After a brief registration process on your phone, the media you upload to your cloud will be available for streaming. Sound quality is determined by the level of network coverage available so obviously things will sound better if you’re using the application in your living room, rather than on a drive through a spotty coverage area.  If you want to ensure pause proof playback, the songs on your cloud can also be downloaded to and played in standard MP3 format. Same deal here though, download speeds aren’t great on 3G networks at around two minutes a song, but on WiFi (News - Alert) the process is significantly faster.

Cloud Player is the first heavy weight entry into cloud based music solution, and followers are a certainty. Apple is rumored to be prepping to enter the space with an update to iTunes in the very near future, as is Google (News - Alert). But Amazon has done it first and they’ve done a great job. Interested parties can check out the app and the Cloud Player: here.

Disclaimer: You should probably still check all your pockets before putting your jeans in the washing machine.

Chris DiMarco is a Web Editor for TMCnet. He holds a master's degree in journalism from Quinnipiac University. Prior to joining TMC (News - Alert) Chris worked with e-commerce provider Suresource as a contact center representative and development analyst. To read more of his articles, please visit his columnist page.

Edited by Janice McDuffee