Google and Amazon recently rolled out services that let you upload your music collection to the cloud and stream music to a smartphone or computer. But if you’re already using Microsoft’s SkyDrive cloud storage service, there’s an app called SkyAmp that will let you stream music from SkyDrive to your Android phone.
Google Music lets you upload 20,000 songs for free (while the service is in beta), while Amazon gives you 5GB of free storage or lets you pay for additional space (with tracks purchased from Amazon MP3 not counting against your limit). But Windows Live SkyDrive gives you 25GB of free storage space that you can use for nearly any file type.
SkyAmp lets you login to your SkyDrive account from Android, find songs in your My Music or other folders, and create local playlists. Then you can go to the Media Player tab in the app to start streaming your music. The app currently only supports MP3 files.
It takes a moment for songs to buffer before they start playing, and since SkyDrive lets you upload individual songs, but not entire folders, your song list will be sorted by title instead of artist unless you create SkyDrive folders before uploading your music.
In other words, while SkyDrive offers a heck of a lot of storage space free of charge, the SkyDrive + SkyAmp experience isn’t quite as user friendly as the experience of using Amazon MP3 or Google Music. Both of those apps were specifically designed to stream music from the cloud, while SkyAmp feels a bit like a tool that was hacked together to stream music from Microsoft’s servers… which is pretty much what it is.
Still, while I wouldn’t necessarily recommend signing up for a SkyDrive account just so you can use SkyAmp on your Android phone, if you’re already using Microsoft’s cloud service to store your music collection, SkyAmp will let you listen on an Android device.
There’s a free “lite” version of SkyAmp which only lets you place 3 songs in a playlist. The full version runs $2.99 and supports Android 2.1 and up.