Kindle Fire: The Missing Manual

Chapter 7. Listening to Music

SHHHH, DON’T TELL APPLE (or its most loyal fanatics), but Amazon’s built up one heckuva well-stocked, bargain-priced digital music service. Everything you buy comes with free online storage, which means never having to worry about backing up your purchases. And they’ve even designed a simple music-playing program that’s less cluttered than iTunes and that can import most of the songs stored there. Take that, Cupertino.

The Fire, as you’d expect, takes full advantage of all this groundwork. And the device manages to overcome its relatively skimpy 8 GB storage capacity by tying its music player into the Amazon Cloud Drive (which, as Cloud vs. Device explains, is where all your music gets stored). When you’re in reach of a good WiFi connection, you barely notice—and don’t even need to understand—the difference between songs streaming over the air and songs stored directly on your Fire. If you can make your way past the hours-long task of moving your music off your PC and up onto Amazon’s online music locker, you’ll be in tune heaven. This chapter shows you how to orchestrate everything: from finding and buying to organizing and listening.

Getting Music onto the Fire

Before hitting Play, you have to load up your virtual jukebox. You can pick from (and freely switch between) three different methods:

Note

The Fire is happy to play a long list of different audio ...