The app not only keeps your music up to date as you purchase additional songs from Amazon or iTunes or as you rip CDs, but it also lets you access Prime Music, including that service’s over 1 million tracks, hundreds of playlists, Prime internet radio stations and more.

The tool, however, is now a little redundant given that Amazon has a fuller, more feature-rich software app called Amazon Music for Mac and PC which includes the uploading function and much more. That service was later renamed “Amazon Music,” for simplicity’s sake. The Music Importer, as the deprecated program was known, would scan your music library in its default location, then move music into Amazon’s “Cloud Player” service for streaming. Still, the uploader program itself did make it easier to get on board with Amazon Music for those who were making the switch, or simply trying to backup their music collection to Amazon’s cloud. It’s possible that this tool wasn’t seeing much usage, as the need to import then organize a digital collection of MP3s wasn’t likely something a ton of Amazon Music customers had to do these days. Today, Amazon is recognizing this change by informing Amazon Music customers that it will no longer offer a dedicated software application to help them upload music into their Amazon Music library. Alongside this shift, it seems that users are becoming less interested in managing their collection of MP3s, in favor of getting the tracks they want delivered on demand, via streaming. Streaming has been eating away into digital and CD sales for years, as consumers turn to online services like Pandora, Spotify, Amazon Prime Music, iHeartRadio, and now Apple Music, among others, to listen to their favorite songs and artists.

Amazon free music app