After making it big as the top-notch online retailer, Amazon has now unveiled its new update for the Cloud Player storage service, which will allow Amazon clients to store upto 250 songs for free. This is a significant update to Amazon's Cloud Player service and is posing a direct competition to iTunes and its popular "scan and match" technology.

To ensure a smooth flow of service, Amazon has tied up with giants like Sony Music Entertainment, EMI Music, Universal Music Group, Warner Music Group and Indie Label distributors. These tie-ups will ensure a speedy availability of music online and on mobile devices too.

To match the standards of iTunes, the service also delivers all the matched tracks at 256 kbps despite the original quality of the tracks. This will in turn help you save a lot of bandwidth. All the Amazon MP3 purchases, which include music that the clients purchased before will be saved to the Cloud Player automatically. The clients will have a cost-free back up copy of their music.

The Cloud Player scans the iTunes and Windows Media Player library of the clients and matches the available songs to the 20 million song catalog of Amazon. These matched songs are then instantly made available on the Cloud Player and are also upgraded to a high quality audio and is free.

Also, if you own any Android device, Sonos home entertainment system, iPhone, iPod Touch or Kindle Fire for that matter, you have the full freedom to play music anywhere. After the free version with 250 songs, the users will have to upgrade to the premium version that would cost merely $25 annually for a whopping 2,50,000 songs! There is however, a slight twist here by Amazon.  Earlier, Amazon offered 5GB memory, which was expandable to further 20GB when the clients purchased music from Amazon's MP3 Store. However, as per the new rule, the Cloud Player prompts users to delete anything beyond 250 songs and opt for the premium version. That $25 goes to Amazon's kitty.

The service clearly mimics the iTunes Cloud Storage service and the scan-and-match cloud storage offering directly competes with the service Apple had announced in 2011. Amazon has also declared that its Cloud Player is coming to Roku streaming devices and Sono players. As of now it is available via Internet and some apps for Android and iOS devices. The app can be downloaded here.