With Amazon AutoRip You Get the MP3s for any CD You Bought Since 1998

Sooner than expected perhaps, Amazon AutoRip, the music matching service that adds an MP3 version of any CD you purchase or have purchased from Amazon in the past to your Amazon Cloud Player, has arrived.

The service is US only for now, but it's already live. Amazon has made deals with three major labels and plenty of other smaller labels as well as publishers to get this working.

In total, AutoRip covers some 50,000 of the most popular CD purchases on Amazon for the past 15 years. It also covers most new releases and purchases.

If you're buying a CD now, you'll be notified that the songs have been added to your Cloud Player as well. If you've never used Cloud Player, you'll have to enable it, but it's a painless process.

In fact, getting more people to use Cloud Player and to a lesser degree Cloud Drive, the storage service associated with it, is probably the main drive behind the feature.

The first time you go to Cloud Player now that the feature is enabled, you'll also be notified of previous CDs you've purchased which have been added to your library.

The songs are available on the web as well as in Amazon's mobile Cloud Player apps. It's unclear whether you'll be able to download the songs, but that's probably not the case.

In the end, AutoRip may be a rather convoluted way of building an on-demand streaming service. With no download option, it works just like a streaming service, just with a much more limited library, only the songs you bought. The upside is that it's free.

If you want to store any songs that you already own, you'll have to pay. After that, any song on your computer will be added to our Cloud Player library.