On the “Improve My Recommendations” page, under Items I’ve Purchased, there’s a box I can check that says “This was a gift”.
Edited to add: The boxes are already checked on some recent purchases that I sent as gifts.
… the things I do for this board.
Ok, so Amazon suckered me into ordered a gift while I was visiting their site, and so I can confirm that during the checkout process it asks you if the item is a gift, and says it will display gift options if you check that box. I checked that box and it asked me if I wanted giftwrapping for £3 (no), a free note on a printed slip, and if I wanted the prices left off the included invoice. Presumably if I now check out the Items I’ve Purchased page under “Improve My Recommendations”, The 2013 Calendar of Awesome will be listed and “This was a gift” will already be checked.
I have at least three albums now available in my cloud that were purchased for others by clicking through their Amazon wish list. Thanks?
I tried to check but their cloud player thing doesn’t work with Linux. Apple and Windows only.
As I am not American and don’t live in the US (or Canada or Europe) I’m curious about whether this applies to me. But not curious enough to reboot into Windows to find out. Anyone know?
I’m in Aus and it emailed me within a minute of signing up for the Amazon Cloud to say it had added a CD I purchased in 2003 to my Cloud. I can’t say if it has omitted any of my CD purchases because I honestly didn’t even remember that I bought that one through Amazon.
Thanks, I’m in Aus too.
Works fine for me in Ubuntu.
Eliahna, thanks for your original research. 
So, the other incentive for someone to bother clicking the “this is a gift” check box, besides wanting it gift-wrapped, is to prevent Amazon from suggesting items for you based on the tastes of other people.
Okay. I doubt many people bother to do this, though – and now even fewer will (I’m guessing). thanks to the new features which are the subject of this thread.
And, just to clarify, we’re talking about two features: 1. The automatic placing in your Cloud of certain CDs you purchased in the past as hard copies – and you can listen to them as streaming music, or download them one by one if you wish; 2. AutoRip, which will automatically do this ripping for you when you purchase hard copy CDs in the future.
I just logged in and it updated with 38 tracks from discs I’ve bought as far back as 1999!
Two articles on the topic:
Amazon gives free digital album to anyone who buys the CD
Don’t hold your breath waiting for Amazon to give you Kindle copies of your books
I’m using Ubuntu, and I got a message saying that the Amazon Cloud Player only works with Apple and Windows. It even listed versions - I’m not mistaken, it definitely happened.
However, seeing your response I checked again, and now it works. 
It’s only giving me five albums, though, and I’ve definitely bought many more than that. Not the most recent 5, either, a couple are from quite a way back.
Amazon apparently has the capability to do this for only some albums. What I find odd, though, is that Amazon gave me part of some CDs I had purchased: only some of the tracks appeared in my Cloud Drive, and I can’t see any logic to which ones were included and which ones hadn’t been.
But I’ve already been using Amazon’s Cloud Player, ripping and importing the CDs I own, and Amazon very often recognizes some, but only some (again, with no apparent logic to which ones) of the tracks I import. (It also occasionally puts wildly inappropriate album art with some of my albums, but that’s another story.)
Yeah, it’d sure be nice if they’d do this, though I’m not expecting them to. With the music thing, they’re just doing for me what I could reasonably easily do for myself (assuming I still have the CD I bought—it wasn’t a gift or something), but I can’t “rip” the dead-tree books I own.
Amazon.
There is a limited amount of space on your Amazon Cloud. As I understand it, after that’s used up, you would be charged for putting anything else on there. Amazon wants to fill it up after which point you supposedly would be so in love with the service that you’d pay to increase capacity.
This would explain why a slew of digital music I bought from Amazon (or got for free) wound up on the cloud even though I specified I wanted to download it to my computer. Lately, Amazon is making it more and more difficult to download purchases to my computer (i.e. repeated insistence I download the Amazon downloader which I’ve already downloaded a few dozen times, aborted downloads etc.). Their business model appears predicated on making money off their cloud services, even at the expense of being a total pain in the ass to their (hopefully shrinking) customer base.
Nope. Any Amazon purchase doesn’t count against your space. Amazon allows you to import 250 songs beyond this, plus gives the option to pay for more.
That said, Google Play offers space for 20,000 songs, which makes for a better cloud storage solution.
But none of this stuff counts against that allotment the way uploaded tracks would. Amazon made about 450 new tracks available to me yesterday, and the “cloud player” page still says that I have space to upload 250 tracks–just like it did before. (Not that I can discern a reason to upload anything to any such system.)
Amazon isn’t really copying anything into ‘my’ cloud, right? It wouldn’t make sense to copy the same things over and over, for each of thousands of people who bought the same stuff. They’re just giving us links to access those tracks in their system.
You know, I’ve been attributing this to bad interface design and incompetence, but you may have a point here. It really has become a pain in the ass to download music from Amazon.
The weird thing is, the Cloud doesn’t really offer me much, from a music serving point of view. I carry my iPod around all the time anyway (so I can play Scrabble and Angry Birds and read email), so it’s not like I’m ever more than 15 inches away from 32 gigabytes of music. When your entire music collection weighs a couple of ounces and fits in a pocket, the cloud isn’t all that necessary.
Amazon MP3 purchases don’t count toward that limited space. I’ve looked, but I haven’t been able to find anything that says whether or not "AutoRip"ped tracks count.
On preview: I wrote this before the most recent posts appeared. From what Peremensoe said, it looks like they don’t count.
Near as I can tell, their business model appears predicated on making it convenient for you to buy music from them instead of from another source.
It used to be that when you bought an MP3 (single or album) from Amazon, you had to download it immediately, and you couldn’t re-download it. This could be a problem if you had a spotty internet connection or were buying one of those 100-track albums. I like the current cloud player model better, since it means I have access to my music, via streaming or downloading, any time from anywhere I have an internet connection.
My understanding – and I’m not 100% sure – is that when you mark something as a gift then the package doesn’t come with a receipt to give away how much you paid. It just sends the item, sans pricing info, to the person you shipped it to.
Of course that only comes in handy when you’re shipping something directly to that person. It wouldn’t help if you ship it to yourself so you can wrap it before putting it under the tree.
I’m still not sure what the difference between the “Cloud Drive” and the “Cloud Player” is. But I have purchased at least seven metric buttloads of CDs from Amazon over the years, and I don’t see any of them in there. I do see the MP3s I’ve bought from Amazon in the Cloud Player. My Cloud Drive is completely empty.
ETA: Spoke too soon. Upon reopening the Cloud Player, I got a pop-up telling me they’ve added 3,491 songs!
if I hadn’t bumped into this thread I wouldn’t have known I even had a cloud player. checked and found 1 CD in there and - boom - now there are 88. I’m embarrassed to have spent so much money without realizing it.
now I suppose I need to buy a portable device of some kind…wonder where I could find one. :rolleyes: