“Welcome to Music Beta, a new service from Google that lets you store your personal collection online and access it instantly without the hassle of wires or syncing.”
I received that message about a week and a half ago, and I’ve been using the service since. Before I go any further, just remember, I’m commenting on a beta, so odds are, some things will get better. To possibly make matters more 
frustrating, I’m taking an early work at three separate but interlocking programs – the uploader, the web interface, and the phone app. That said, my experience so far with it can be summed up in six words: less than perfect, but freakin’ awesome.
In case you’ve been living under a rock, Music is Google’s free cloud streaming music service. Currently, it’s in an invitation-only beta, which you can sign up for here. It lets you store 20,000 of your own non-DRMed .mp3, .wma, .m4a and even .flac files, although it will convert the lossless files to 320kbps MP3. That means you get a lot of music stored online. For free. As long as your music isn’t DRM-protected, Apple lossless, or some stupid format like .rm (seriously, they actually felt the need to say you couldn’t run Real Audio files?), it also allows you to play your music from any computer connected to the internet and any Android phone capable of running.
To get that music online, you need to upload it. Google actually gives you some free songs – oddly decent, even if that means downloading and installing Google’s Music Manager software. It runs easily enough, allowing you to choose files through iTunes, Windows Media Player, out of your Music folder, or in a folder that you specify. I wish there was some kind of drag and drop functionality, but sadly, this is Google and not Dropbox. It would be nice if you could individually select or deselect files through the uploader as well – something the Amazon uploader lets you do – but I’m saving any more direct comparisons for a later article.
It turns out, I have upwards of 13,000 music files to upload. That’s about 72 gigs, which means I’m not going to listen to all of my music at once any time soon. Unfortunately, that’s not the only problem with the upload process. Not all of my album art transfers. Some songs that I know for a fact were a part of certain albums now sit all by their lonesome. Fortunately, album artwork and metadata are editable, but there’s no super easy way of doing it. There’s no built-in album art search. You have to download art locally to your computer, and then upload it to your Music account. Likewise, if you want to put a song into an album, you have to manually copy and paste all the information from the album into the file. It’s not hard, just more time consuming than it could be. If you are a perfectionist, expect to spend some time in front of your computer fixing your music files. Also, if it uploads any pre-existing playlists, it didn’t upload any of mine, so that’s one more thing I get to correct.
Now would seem like a good idea to check out the Android app. For reference, my phone is an original Motorola DROID. At the time of this writing, it is running Gingerbread from Cyanogenmod 7.0.3, overclocked to 1.1GHz and running Swapper 2 for extra RAM. That means I am running Google Music Beta on a somewhat older phone, but souped up way past spec.
I installed the new Music app some time ago, but despite my being accepted into the beta, it only shows me the music stored locally on my phone. Eventually, I tried deleting and reinstalling the app, which got things to work properly. Apparently, you can also just delete the application data through the settings menu, but either way, none of this was in the setup guide, making the process mildly frustrating.
On the plus side, cloud music shows up on the phone, mixed in with locally-stored music. I don’t know if this is just my perception, but while the music does load, it doesn’t seem to load as smoothly while I upload it to the cloud as it did when everything is finished. Don’t let your initial impressions sour you on the service, it gets better.
The Music app itself is somewhat stripped down. There is no built-in equalizer, although I find the free app Equalizer plugs in quite nicely. I’ve had other music apps that look a little better and are a little more fully featured. Oddly, some features in the previous version of Music are not included in the new one, like extra widgets.
The beta has one serious flaw phone-side – the size. The just shy of 14,000 songs in my account has generated 13.5MB of application data that I can’t figure out any way to move to my SD card. With the limited onboard memory on my DROID, that becomes a problem.
Now that I’ve gotten the complaints out of the way, on to the good parts – it works. I have access to basically all of my music on my phone as long as I have a semi-decent 3G signal. The search function works, along with Voice Search, which makes it usable in the car. Not only can playlists be accessed from the phone, but they can be generated and saved to the cloud on the fly, with fairly easy functionality. If you’re feeling lazy, the “Make instant mix” button puts together a playlist of similar songs similar to Apple’s Genius functions.
The music quality is amazing – or at least as amazing as whatever quality you recorded the MP3 at, combined with the overall musical quality of your hardware. There can be a little lag between songs, especially if you hit skip a bunch of times, but the playback regularly seems almost gapless. I am having a bit of a playback glitch, in that the first song or two has a tendency to stop early, but it seems to stop after that.
Music is still in beta, and Google has never been a company to shy away from adding functionality to their products, so I have a lot of hope for it. It wouldn’t take that much to turn Music into a near-perfect product. My wish list includes a smoother upload experience, artwork that goes more full-screen, swipe controls, and more gapless playback. I will be writing a subsequent article comparing Music to other cloud music services, some of which have stronger features. Overall, I think I have a new go-to source for my music player.
This sounds great. I’ll be signing up when I get home.
Nice write up on Google’s Music service. I got my invite around the beginning of the month and for the most part I like it. I have not experienced the issue with it taking app data in main memory, for me it seems to store all its data on the SD card in \Android\data\com.google.android.music\cache\ there are 2 subfolders one called music and the other called artwork. The music folder has all the cloud downloaded music files and about once a week its gets purged and redownloads whatever it needs to, this folder has gotten as big as 400MB on my Nexus One. For those interested the cache\music folder has no protection on it and if you like you can copy the audio files right out of that folder to your PC and “add to your collection”.
I for one liked the free music they offered up for you when you first install the music manager and login to the website, you choose genres of music you like and it auto-populates some free music for you to stream whenever on your device this music disappears when you lose your data connection. You can cache an artists songs to be available offline from the artists tab in the Google Music app on your phone problem is you can cache the artist only not specific songs. And with the free music they offer you its only like one track from a album and no options to buy more from that artist, no links to Amazon MP3 if you have that installed all it does is give you a generic Google shopper page with a search for the artists name. Quality of the free music depends on you data connection at the time of download I’ve gotten 14 MB 3.5 minute tracks in mp3 @ 320kbps as well as 3 MB & 7 minute 64kbps tracks. Some suggested listening might be something for them to add to the service since I knew about the issues with how long it would take to upload my entire music collection to Google I only uploaded about 6 albums and some random songs about 175 songs total, I’m not sure if it analyzed what was uploaded when the free music showed up or not but a lot of it I do actually own in one form or another.
It’s not a cache issue. The cache is the mp3 files, like you said, and that’s storing to the SD card. This is app data that seems to be linked to just holding the list of the music I can stream. Even if I clear it, it starts coming back as soon as the Music app refreshes itself. But you have more onboard memory on the Nexus than I do on my DROID. Also, if you only uploaded six albums, you probably aren’t going to get the same issue. That’s maybe what, 200 songs? I have over 13,000.
I agree with the music, though. So does Google. You know they wanted to have more of a music store, but deals fell through. Although I kind of like having it unattached from a market. It makes it feel more clean.