12 ms·

Google Music: The Best Service That Nobody’s Using

59 points by bigmetalman 15y ago

51Cards 15y ago
Bring it to Canada and I'll add one more to the user count gladly. (yes, I know I can jump through hoops to do it now in a limited fashion)
- psychotik 15y ago
  Try Audiogalaxy - our users prefer it to Google Music, and it's available worldwide. http://www.audiogalaxy.com http://www.audiogalaxy.com
- rodion_89 15y ago
  Pro tip for fellow Canadian residents: 1. Login to Google Music once from an American IP address. 2. Use it forever from any IP address.
RobertKohr 15y ago
He talks about some issues of if you have pirated music, google wouldn't likely be able to target you, but that is nonsense. A ripped copy of a song put up online can be as unique as a fingerprint (and if put up by a record company, could have a fingerprint). This could be detected by google, and they could report you. But, it isn't illegal to own pirated music. It is just illegal to distribute them. So perhaps this isn't a problem?
- sirclueless 15y ago
  > it isn't illegal to own pirated music IANAL, but it was always my impression that that owning and pirating music was illegal, but it was just that the lucrative civil damages suits come from targeting distributors. If Google Music becomes a central hosting platform, then subpoenaing them for information about customers with known contraband music might become trivial technically and therefore economically feasible.
- pyre 15y ago
  > A ripped copy of a song put up online can be > as unique as a fingerprint If they are just MD5'ing the file, then changes to the metadata could cause this fingerprint to change. > But, it isn't illegal to own pirated music. It is > just illegal to distribute them. So perhaps this > isn't a problem? Record companies (IIRC) have successfully argued that streaming your own music to yourself is a 'broadcast/performance' to a single person. There are many ways that they could attempt to go after this.
  - Arelius 15y ago
    It's trivial to just skip the header and metadata sectors, and just MD5/SHA the actual bitstream. With a bit more compute resources you can do the same for the decompressed audio stream, but that'd likely prove less advantageous.
    - RexRollman 15y ago
      That's interesting, as I use Exact Audio Copy with Accurate Rip, which actually compares my rips to other user's rips to ensure it was done properly. This means that I have FLAC files that would compare to other user's; sans the differences in Metadata.
      - pyre 15y ago
        Well, when the BSA^wRIAA auditors come to your door, you'll just have to show them your CD collection! If you don't have any pirated material, then you have nothing to hide!
        RexRollman 15y ago
        I actually no longer keep CDs. Since no one sells lossless music, aside from mostly indie artists, I purchase used CDs, which I then rip and throw away (Amazon is a great source for used CDs, by the way). I like having lots of music, and paying for it, but I am not a fan of owning a physical CDs.
      - 15y ago
snampall 15y ago
I use it and it's the most used app of my smart phone.
odiroot 15y ago
Well this headline is really unfair. I love Google Music, though not in a browser. It's a really great service once you run it in Nuvola Player (multimedia keys support, switching to Grooveshark and other services). Too bad you have to "cheat" to register from Europe.
- rplnt 15y ago
  When they opened (hune/july last year) and it was invite-only (but everyone got like five of them right after registration) it worked fine. It was probably a mistake on their side but they didn't revoke the accounts.
- StavrosK 15y ago
  Jesus, how great is Nuvola? Thanks for the awesome program of the day.
chrischen 15y ago
> no known digital music distributor has gone through the trouble of weaving personally identifying information into each track they sell, and if they did, it would be a much bigger deal than a few bootlegs getting uploaded into Google Music. Err... Actually iTunes weaves your ID into files you buy and nobody seemed to notice evidently (so it wasn't a big deal).
- psychotik 15y ago
  Amazon does too. It's a music industry thing. See http://uits.umusic.com/faq.htm http://uits.umusic.com/faq.htm
  - RexRollman 15y ago
    Amazon doesn't do that to all tracks, and they tell you when they do.
- ugh 15y ago
  Maybe he means watermarks? The stuff iTunes adds is just metadata. It’s easy to remove. I don’t think anyone could be outraged about that (Why the hell would anyone be?) but watermarks might well cause a different reaction.
  - chrischen 15y ago
    It might as well be a watermark. I don't think anyone removes it.
valgaze 15y ago
I would pay $$ for Google Music. I have loaded up a bunch of old radio shows & lectures for which I would not have the space on my phone but w/ Google Music I'm all set. If the team can figure out easy streaming podcasts (like Android Double Twist but without so much spammy/crap content) they will have themselves a nice little business
drivebyacct2 15y ago
Why? I have a Subsonic server. It supports more formats, transcoding, (effectively) infinite storage. Open API for making mobile apps, etc. (heh, my reply made more sense with the original title)
thomasknowles 15y ago
If I had it in the UK and they didn't convert flac and I would gladly pay. However, the don't and do.
eli 15y ago
The fact of the matter is, there is absolutely no way Google could determine if your tracks were illegally downloaded or simply ripped from your own physical discs. Well that's simply false. If I ripped a CD myself, it wouldn't be byte-for-byte identical as the copy on Pirate Bay. In fact, if I rip it myself and don't share that rip with anyone it should probably be unique within the system. And how hard would it be to figure out who has illegal copies of an unreleased album?
- weff 15y ago
  Would it not be possible for you to rip with super standard settings thus making it pretty much like every other rip? I don't see how ripping could be so different if people use the same settings.
  - gravitronic 15y ago
    From what I understand-- The "lossy" part of MP3 is that the encoder decides to throw away frequency bands to reduce the information size. This is more than just choosing a bitrate and being done with it - different encoders treat different bands as important or unimportant, attempting to make a smaller sized file still sound better.
    - pyre 15y ago
      Right, but the music pirates don't write their own encoders. They are likely using software like LAME, EAC, and FLAC when ripping. Therefore, as long as someone uses the same settings, they could end up with an exact duplicate rip.
    - weff 15y ago
      Indeed but really, how many encoders does one use? That is, it's not like there are dozens of them that are widely used. If there are only 2 or 3 (say, LAME, some Apple one and some Microsoft one) and people usually use 2 or 3 bitrates... well that leaves quite the space for overlapping.
- illumin8 15y ago
Arelius 15y ago
I'd like to mention that iTunes Match is a similar service for Apple customers, the integration with Apple products has been better than Google's integration with droid IMO. It's not free, but at just over $2 a month, it seems to give Apple a lot more flexibility with bargaining with the publishers, which makes me feel a bit more secure about the future of the service and my personal music collection. Also, it's surprisingly nice to have it match against songs that are already uploaded to their service, It took over a month to get my entire library into the Google Music cloud, yet all my music was available in iTunes match within the hour.
- oflannabhra 15y ago
  The fact that iTunes Match does not stream content puts it in a separate class of service than Google Music and Amazon Cloud Player, in my opinion.
  - culturestate 15y ago
    Apple says at http://www.apple.com/itunes/itunes-match/ http://www.apple.com/itunes/itunes-match/ that iTM is a streaming service, though I've not used it so can't personally confirm. "Does iTunes Match stream or download songs? On a computer, any songs stored in iCloud will stream over the air when played, though you can download them at any time by clicking the iCloud download button. iOS devices will start playing tracks from iCloud as they download and will store them so that you can listen to them later even if you don’t have a network connection. Apple TV only streams songs."
    - deleted 15y ago
      [deleted]
    - Arelius 15y ago
      Yes, the only real difference is that, given sufficient local storage, the song will also get copied to your local device. This seems like an advantage IMO.
  - Terretta 15y ago
snampall 15y ago
I love google music and I use it everyday. It's the most used app of my smart phone. I wish they had a download option for all the music not just the music that I bought on google. That would help me to get rid of all the music on my computer.
- olegious 15y ago
  They do. Just shift select all the songs that you want to download, click that little menu button and select "download all songs"
baconhigh 15y ago
No. Because it's not available in my fucking country yet.
ackmm7 15y ago
I've played with Google Music for quite some time and while its a really great service I have one major gripe... Data Usage! For some reason Google Music will use almost 2.5x the amount of data that Pandora or Spotify use on my phone. (Keep in mind this is with Background data and High quality streaming turned OFF!) In this mobile data cap / throttle world that we live in I can't afford to have my music app use more than 2gb of a data a month!
johnnyg 15y ago
I installed Google Music to my MacBook Pro a few months ago. It kept prompting me with the install screen, long after I'd dragged it into my apps folder. I didn't use it and uninstalled it by dragging the app icon into the trash. Didn't work. I tried the AppDelete path. No go. I googled around and found I was not the only one. Uninstall is broken and you are basically stuck with a prompt twice a day to install the Google Music app until you reinstall your OS or go slogging through the guts of your box, throwing switches you don't understand by mixing internal uninstall tutorials (ok, to be fair, this is how you do just about everything...). In conclusion, that app is a daily annoyance and I'd caution people against installing it.
- psychotik 15y ago
  You should try http://www.audiogalaxy.com http://www.audiogalaxy.com. I think you'll like it. Don't take my word for it though - I've built it. Look up user reviews on iTunes/Android.
  - rodion_89 15y ago
    Your stat counter is almost identical to that on the front page of Apple.com..
    - psychotik 15y ago
      Heh, theirs has a bigger number and flips much faster. This style of counter is pretty common, afaik.
      - true_religion 15y ago
        Yeah, it was popularized by physical tally counters [1], long before it made it into software UI. They are still used sometimes at concerts or carnivals to tally up people entering a location for records keeping, and to make sure that you're under fire code. I have one of these counters too, but I only use it on the range to keep track of how many targets I've hit by sheer chance. ;) [1] http://9cloud.us/c/general/pictures/album/36357/id/1239690/ http://9cloud.us/c/general/pictures/album/36357/id/1239690/
ajross 15y ago
I want to like it, but it's not doing what I want. I have a ton of music on my Android phone, but app won't sync from a phone, only from a desktop computer. The corroloary to this is that music I get from outside the Android market (e.g. friends, random downloads, Amazon MP3) is invisible to the cloud unless I copy it manually. And the Linux app sucks rocks. My memory is that it's an enormous pain to get installed on F16/x86-64. It doesn't understand the standard proxy environment variables or gconf settings, and in fact when used behind a proxy, THE UI LOCKS UP SOLID a few seconds after starting. So I can't use it at work. (Because who wants to listen to music at work?) I wouldn't even care, except that I have to use the desktop app. Even things that I'd think would work as web apps aren't there. You can't upload from a web app. You can't manage play lists from a web app. That said, the Android player app is actually not bad at all, and I do use it. But the cloud side of the equation is a total fail from my perspective.
- lepht 15y ago
  Same experience here, and the situation on the iPhone is even worse: there's not even a native first-party app.
lucb1e 15y ago
@Title: Wonder why that is... We're sorry. Google Music is currently only available in the United States.
sheckel 15y ago
If you signed up early enough and bought an album (or something like that), Amazon gave out free unlimited storage for music. With that, there's no good reason to move to Google (20k song limit) - they have a perfectly good Android app, a decent web player, and they make it a snap to upload/download from your computer. I've tried Google music out and I agree - the software is really annoying. It doesn't help that I already spent a month uploading my music to Amazon. I'm not going through that again anytime soon.
- moeffju 15y ago
  I signed up very early, but Amazon wouldn't let me buy an album from Amazon.com and wouldn't count albums from Amazon.de. Internet without borders, please..?
jsz0 15y ago
It's just too buggy for me. I've had issues with the music manager not uploading new music, the Android app screwing up album sorting/track numbers, to long (5 minute+) delays in starting the streaming, tons of problems with artwork, etc. Nice idea but it just didn't seem to actually work very well for me. I've had much better results with Subsonic. It's not the same type of service as Google Music (you host the server on your own computer / connection) but it offers a lot of advantages. Pretty easy to install too. As long as you have a machine available 24x7 and a halfway decent Internet connection it works fantastically well.
autarch 15y ago
Another link to page 2 of an article.
msg 15y ago
Also on a Mac. I had noticed the DMG for the Google Music Manager opening repeatedly, but I chalked it up to a Finder window being open during a shutdown or reboot. Interesting that you can't stop it. My workflow is the following: 1. Wait for Amazon MP3 special for album I want 2. Buy album 3. Download to Mac with MP3 downloader 4. Sync Google Music with iTunes library. 5. Stream Google Music to phone and browser at work. This way I have a physical master to use how I see fit. Prices are usually better on Amazon than iTunes store, $4 per album unless I'm buying from a personal favorite on release day. Selection is basically universal. I've been liking this scrobbler/lyrics looker-upper for the web client: http://www.danielslaughter.com/projects/google-music-with-lastfm/ http://www.danielslaughter.com/projects/google-music-with-la...
ek 15y ago
One of the issues with Google Music, and this is something that I have seen increasingly over the past year or so, is that it seems that I can often roll my own, better solution to problems that these services claim to solve. In this specific case, running MPD into an Icecast stream means that I have remote access to my music library from anywhere, and using flacsync to make lossy copies of my FLAC files means that it's easy for me to manually manage the library on my MP3 player. All this without the pain of having to deal with the issues that this article talks about. Obviously this setup is rather technical, and requires a nontrivial bit of setup work, but the fact that it is often easy to have ideas for substantial life improvements and then implement them well, with free software, has left me a bit disenchanted with the offerings from large, generally innovative companies like Google and Apple (a similar hack for streaming music to an AirPort Express from MPD can be had with the raop-play module for PulseAudio, for example).
potater 15y ago
My overall experience with Google Music has been kinda meh. I like their sharing functionality, but my first purchase was a pain in the butt…. I finally decided to buy a few albums during the big music sale G Music promoted during the holiday season. Unfortunately every time I'd check out it would prompt me to log in again. During this I noticed that at least some element of the process was using a different subdomain than the album page I was checking out from. Not sure if the login cookie just wasn't persisting across differing subdomains domains or my browser was set to block cookies set by third parties, but I vaguely remember having to manually whitelist the domain in Chrome's cookie exception manager to complete my purchase. It took a moment to figure out because there was no particular useful error - just the prompt to log in again. I have no idea if I previously changed a setting in Chrome that resulted in this annoyance or if it was a default setting in Chrome, but that nearly prevented me from buying from Google's music service. There's no way someone like my Mom or sister would've figured that out. I hope they resolved that component assuming the problem wasn't limited to just my set up because at the time I thought it was rather silly that I wasn't able to easily purchase from a Google browser without modifying settings.
- thewordis 15y ago
  It's caused by the checkbox to deny third-party cookies, and it's on their known issues page. http://support.google.com/androidmarket/bin/static.py?hl=en&page=known_issues.cs&ki_topic=1335215 http://support.google.com/androidmarket/bin/static.py?hl=en&...
  - potater 15y ago
    Ahh, thanks for the heads up, thewordis. It's nice to know that they're aware of the problem.
thewordis 15y ago
It works pretty well for me. My feature wishlist: * iOS native app * nested playlists * smart playlists * playlist pictures * playlist export * gapless playback * built-in scrobbling to last.fm * volume control in android store * music manager instant recognition
moeffju 15y ago
I can't tell if this article is serious or satire. Of course Google could hash your tracks locally before "reencoding" them (do they really re-encode tracks? I thought they only transcoded FLAC to MP3, but didn't touch MP3s). Of course, iTunes and Amazon tag/watermark your purchased tracks, even if there's no DRM. Lastly, of course people use Google Music. In fact, I use it so much and it's so well integrated into Android that I didn't even realize I didn't transfer any files to my new phone until I travelled to Brazil and was without data connection for half a day.

59 points by bigmetalman 15y ago

Bring it to Canada and I'll add one more to the user count gladly. (yes, I know I can jump through hoops to do it now in a limited fashion)

psychotik 15y ago
Try Audiogalaxy - our users prefer it to Google Music, and it's available worldwide. http://www.audiogalaxy.com http://www.audiogalaxy.com
rodion_89 15y ago
Pro tip for fellow Canadian residents: 1. Login to Google Music once from an American IP address. 2. Use it forever from any IP address.

RobertKohr 15y ago

He talks about some issues of if you have pirated music, google wouldn't likely be able to target you, but that is nonsense. A ripped copy of a song put up online can be as unique as a fingerprint (and if put up by a record company, could have a fingerprint). This could be detected by google, and they could report you. But, it isn't illegal to own pirated music. It is just illegal to distribute them. So perhaps this isn't a problem?

sirclueless 15y ago
> it isn't illegal to own pirated music IANAL, but it was always my impression that that owning and pirating music was illegal, but it was just that the lucrative civil damages suits come from targeting distributors. If Google Music becomes a central hosting platform, then subpoenaing them for information about customers with known contraband music might become trivial technically and therefore economically feasible.
pyre 15y ago
> A ripped copy of a song put up online can be > as unique as a fingerprint If they are just MD5'ing the file, then changes to the metadata could cause this fingerprint to change. > But, it isn't illegal to own pirated music. It is > just illegal to distribute them. So perhaps this > isn't a problem? Record companies (IIRC) have successfully argued that streaming your own music to yourself is a 'broadcast/performance' to a single person. There are many ways that they could attempt to go after this.
- Arelius 15y ago
  It's trivial to just skip the header and metadata sectors, and just MD5/SHA the actual bitstream. With a bit more compute resources you can do the same for the decompressed audio stream, but that'd likely prove less advantageous.
  - RexRollman 15y ago
    That's interesting, as I use Exact Audio Copy with Accurate Rip, which actually compares my rips to other user's rips to ensure it was done properly. This means that I have FLAC files that would compare to other user's; sans the differences in Metadata.
    - pyre 15y ago
      Well, when the BSA^wRIAA auditors come to your door, you'll just have to show them your CD collection! If you don't have any pirated material, then you have nothing to hide!
      - RexRollman 15y ago
        I actually no longer keep CDs. Since no one sells lossless music, aside from mostly indie artists, I purchase used CDs, which I then rip and throw away (Amazon is a great source for used CDs, by the way). I like having lots of music, and paying for it, but I am not a fan of owning a physical CDs.
    - 15y ago

snampall 15y ago

I use it and it's the most used app of my smart phone.

odiroot 15y ago

Well this headline is really unfair. I love Google Music, though not in a browser. It's a really great service once you run it in Nuvola Player (multimedia keys support, switching to Grooveshark and other services). Too bad you have to "cheat" to register from Europe.

rplnt 15y ago
When they opened (hune/july last year) and it was invite-only (but everyone got like five of them right after registration) it worked fine. It was probably a mistake on their side but they didn't revoke the accounts.
StavrosK 15y ago
Jesus, how great is Nuvola? Thanks for the awesome program of the day.

chrischen 15y ago

> no known digital music distributor has gone through the trouble of weaving personally identifying information into each track they sell, and if they did, it would be a much bigger deal than a few bootlegs getting uploaded into Google Music. Err... Actually iTunes weaves your ID into files you buy and nobody seemed to notice evidently (so it wasn't a big deal).

psychotik 15y ago
Amazon does too. It's a music industry thing. See http://uits.umusic.com/faq.htm http://uits.umusic.com/faq.htm
- RexRollman 15y ago
  Amazon doesn't do that to all tracks, and they tell you when they do.
ugh 15y ago
Maybe he means watermarks? The stuff iTunes adds is just metadata. It’s easy to remove. I don’t think anyone could be outraged about that (Why the hell would anyone be?) but watermarks might well cause a different reaction.
- chrischen 15y ago
  It might as well be a watermark. I don't think anyone removes it.

valgaze 15y ago

I would pay $$ for Google Music. I have loaded up a bunch of old radio shows & lectures for which I would not have the space on my phone but w/ Google Music I'm all set. If the team can figure out easy streaming podcasts (like Android Double Twist but without so much spammy/crap content) they will have themselves a nice little business

drivebyacct2 15y ago

Why? I have a Subsonic server. It supports more formats, transcoding, (effectively) infinite storage. Open API for making mobile apps, etc. (heh, my reply made more sense with the original title)

thomasknowles 15y ago

If I had it in the UK and they didn't convert flac and I would gladly pay. However, the don't and do.

eli 15y ago

The fact of the matter is, there is absolutely no way Google could determine if your tracks were illegally downloaded or simply ripped from your own physical discs. Well that's simply false. If I ripped a CD myself, it wouldn't be byte-for-byte identical as the copy on Pirate Bay. In fact, if I rip it myself and don't share that rip with anyone it should probably be unique within the system. And how hard would it be to figure out who has illegal copies of an unreleased album?

weff 15y ago
Would it not be possible for you to rip with super standard settings thus making it pretty much like every other rip? I don't see how ripping could be so different if people use the same settings.
- gravitronic 15y ago
  From what I understand-- The "lossy" part of MP3 is that the encoder decides to throw away frequency bands to reduce the information size. This is more than just choosing a bitrate and being done with it - different encoders treat different bands as important or unimportant, attempting to make a smaller sized file still sound better.
  - pyre 15y ago
    Right, but the music pirates don't write their own encoders. They are likely using software like LAME, EAC, and FLAC when ripping. Therefore, as long as someone uses the same settings, they could end up with an exact duplicate rip.
  - weff 15y ago
    Indeed but really, how many encoders does one use? That is, it's not like there are dozens of them that are widely used. If there are only 2 or 3 (say, LAME, some Apple one and some Microsoft one) and people usually use 2 or 3 bitrates... well that leaves quite the space for overlapping.
illumin8 15y ago

Arelius 15y ago

I'd like to mention that iTunes Match is a similar service for Apple customers, the integration with Apple products has been better than Google's integration with droid IMO. It's not free, but at just over $2 a month, it seems to give Apple a lot more flexibility with bargaining with the publishers, which makes me feel a bit more secure about the future of the service and my personal music collection. Also, it's surprisingly nice to have it match against songs that are already uploaded to their service, It took over a month to get my entire library into the Google Music cloud, yet all my music was available in iTunes match within the hour.

oflannabhra 15y ago
The fact that iTunes Match does not stream content puts it in a separate class of service than Google Music and Amazon Cloud Player, in my opinion.
- culturestate 15y ago
  Apple says at http://www.apple.com/itunes/itunes-match/ http://www.apple.com/itunes/itunes-match/ that iTM is a streaming service, though I've not used it so can't personally confirm. "Does iTunes Match stream or download songs? On a computer, any songs stored in iCloud will stream over the air when played, though you can download them at any time by clicking the iCloud download button. iOS devices will start playing tracks from iCloud as they download and will store them so that you can listen to them later even if you don’t have a network connection. Apple TV only streams songs."
  - deleted 15y ago
    [deleted]
  - Arelius 15y ago
    Yes, the only real difference is that, given sufficient local storage, the song will also get copied to your local device. This seems like an advantage IMO.
- Terretta 15y ago

snampall 15y ago

I love google music and I use it everyday. It's the most used app of my smart phone. I wish they had a download option for all the music not just the music that I bought on google. That would help me to get rid of all the music on my computer.

olegious 15y ago
They do. Just shift select all the songs that you want to download, click that little menu button and select "download all songs"

baconhigh 15y ago

No. Because it's not available in my fucking country yet.

ackmm7 15y ago

I've played with Google Music for quite some time and while its a really great service I have one major gripe... Data Usage! For some reason Google Music will use almost 2.5x the amount of data that Pandora or Spotify use on my phone. (Keep in mind this is with Background data and High quality streaming turned OFF!) In this mobile data cap / throttle world that we live in I can't afford to have my music app use more than 2gb of a data a month!

johnnyg 15y ago

I installed Google Music to my MacBook Pro a few months ago. It kept prompting me with the install screen, long after I'd dragged it into my apps folder. I didn't use it and uninstalled it by dragging the app icon into the trash. Didn't work. I tried the AppDelete path. No go. I googled around and found I was not the only one. Uninstall is broken and you are basically stuck with a prompt twice a day to install the Google Music app until you reinstall your OS or go slogging through the guts of your box, throwing switches you don't understand by mixing internal uninstall tutorials (ok, to be fair, this is how you do just about everything...). In conclusion, that app is a daily annoyance and I'd caution people against installing it.

psychotik 15y ago
You should try http://www.audiogalaxy.com http://www.audiogalaxy.com. I think you'll like it. Don't take my word for it though - I've built it. Look up user reviews on iTunes/Android.
- rodion_89 15y ago
  Your stat counter is almost identical to that on the front page of Apple.com..
  - psychotik 15y ago
    Heh, theirs has a bigger number and flips much faster. This style of counter is pretty common, afaik.
    - true_religion 15y ago
      Yeah, it was popularized by physical tally counters [1], long before it made it into software UI. They are still used sometimes at concerts or carnivals to tally up people entering a location for records keeping, and to make sure that you're under fire code. I have one of these counters too, but I only use it on the range to keep track of how many targets I've hit by sheer chance. ;) [1] http://9cloud.us/c/general/pictures/album/36357/id/1239690/ http://9cloud.us/c/general/pictures/album/36357/id/1239690/

ajross 15y ago

I want to like it, but it's not doing what I want. I have a ton of music on my Android phone, but app won't sync from a phone, only from a desktop computer. The corroloary to this is that music I get from outside the Android market (e.g. friends, random downloads, Amazon MP3) is invisible to the cloud unless I copy it manually. And the Linux app sucks rocks. My memory is that it's an enormous pain to get installed on F16/x86-64. It doesn't understand the standard proxy environment variables or gconf settings, and in fact when used behind a proxy, THE UI LOCKS UP SOLID a few seconds after starting. So I can't use it at work. (Because who wants to listen to music at work?) I wouldn't even care, except that I have to use the desktop app. Even things that I'd think would work as web apps aren't there. You can't upload from a web app. You can't manage play lists from a web app. That said, the Android player app is actually not bad at all, and I do use it. But the cloud side of the equation is a total fail from my perspective.

lepht 15y ago
Same experience here, and the situation on the iPhone is even worse: there's not even a native first-party app.

lucb1e 15y ago

@Title: Wonder why that is... We're sorry. Google Music is currently only available in the United States.

sheckel 15y ago

If you signed up early enough and bought an album (or something like that), Amazon gave out free unlimited storage for music. With that, there's no good reason to move to Google (20k song limit) - they have a perfectly good Android app, a decent web player, and they make it a snap to upload/download from your computer. I've tried Google music out and I agree - the software is really annoying. It doesn't help that I already spent a month uploading my music to Amazon. I'm not going through that again anytime soon.

moeffju 15y ago
I signed up very early, but Amazon wouldn't let me buy an album from Amazon.com and wouldn't count albums from Amazon.de. Internet without borders, please..?

jsz0 15y ago

It's just too buggy for me. I've had issues with the music manager not uploading new music, the Android app screwing up album sorting/track numbers, to long (5 minute+) delays in starting the streaming, tons of problems with artwork, etc. Nice idea but it just didn't seem to actually work very well for me. I've had much better results with Subsonic. It's not the same type of service as Google Music (you host the server on your own computer / connection) but it offers a lot of advantages. Pretty easy to install too. As long as you have a machine available 24x7 and a halfway decent Internet connection it works fantastically well.

autarch 15y ago

Another link to page 2 of an article.

msg 15y ago

Also on a Mac. I had noticed the DMG for the Google Music Manager opening repeatedly, but I chalked it up to a Finder window being open during a shutdown or reboot. Interesting that you can't stop it. My workflow is the following: 1. Wait for Amazon MP3 special for album I want 2. Buy album 3. Download to Mac with MP3 downloader 4. Sync Google Music with iTunes library. 5. Stream Google Music to phone and browser at work. This way I have a physical master to use how I see fit. Prices are usually better on Amazon than iTunes store, $4 per album unless I'm buying from a personal favorite on release day. Selection is basically universal. I've been liking this scrobbler/lyrics looker-upper for the web client: http://www.danielslaughter.com/projects/google-music-with-lastfm/ http://www.danielslaughter.com/projects/google-music-with-la...

ek 15y ago

One of the issues with Google Music, and this is something that I have seen increasingly over the past year or so, is that it seems that I can often roll my own, better solution to problems that these services claim to solve. In this specific case, running MPD into an Icecast stream means that I have remote access to my music library from anywhere, and using flacsync to make lossy copies of my FLAC files means that it's easy for me to manually manage the library on my MP3 player. All this without the pain of having to deal with the issues that this article talks about. Obviously this setup is rather technical, and requires a nontrivial bit of setup work, but the fact that it is often easy to have ideas for substantial life improvements and then implement them well, with free software, has left me a bit disenchanted with the offerings from large, generally innovative companies like Google and Apple (a similar hack for streaming music to an AirPort Express from MPD can be had with the raop-play module for PulseAudio, for example).

potater 15y ago

My overall experience with Google Music has been kinda meh. I like their sharing functionality, but my first purchase was a pain in the butt…. I finally decided to buy a few albums during the big music sale G Music promoted during the holiday season. Unfortunately every time I'd check out it would prompt me to log in again. During this I noticed that at least some element of the process was using a different subdomain than the album page I was checking out from. Not sure if the login cookie just wasn't persisting across differing subdomains domains or my browser was set to block cookies set by third parties, but I vaguely remember having to manually whitelist the domain in Chrome's cookie exception manager to complete my purchase. It took a moment to figure out because there was no particular useful error - just the prompt to log in again. I have no idea if I previously changed a setting in Chrome that resulted in this annoyance or if it was a default setting in Chrome, but that nearly prevented me from buying from Google's music service. There's no way someone like my Mom or sister would've figured that out. I hope they resolved that component assuming the problem wasn't limited to just my set up because at the time I thought it was rather silly that I wasn't able to easily purchase from a Google browser without modifying settings.

thewordis 15y ago
It's caused by the checkbox to deny third-party cookies, and it's on their known issues page. http://support.google.com/androidmarket/bin/static.py?hl=en&page=known_issues.cs&ki_topic=1335215 http://support.google.com/androidmarket/bin/static.py?hl=en&...
- potater 15y ago
  Ahh, thanks for the heads up, thewordis. It's nice to know that they're aware of the problem.

thewordis 15y ago

It works pretty well for me. My feature wishlist: * iOS native app * nested playlists * smart playlists * playlist pictures * playlist export * gapless playback * built-in scrobbling to last.fm * volume control in android store * music manager instant recognition

moeffju 15y ago

I can't tell if this article is serious or satire. Of course Google could hash your tracks locally before "reencoding" them (do they really re-encode tracks? I thought they only transcoded FLAC to MP3, but didn't touch MP3s). Of course, iTunes and Amazon tag/watermark your purchased tracks, even if there's no DRM. Lastly, of course people use Google Music. In fact, I use it so much and it's so well integrated into Android that I didn't even realize I didn't transfer any files to my new phone until I travelled to Brazil and was without data connection for half a day.