Put All of Your Music in the Cloud with Google Music

It was not too long ago that Google announced their cloud based music player, Music beta by Google. After using Amazon’s Cloud Player for a while, I was excited to see what Google had to offer. I am after all, an Android user and I border on Google fanboydom. While I think the coup de gras of Music beta is tight Android integration, I decided to take a close look at the web app as a music player, much like I did for Amazon Cloud Player. Here’s what I found.

I will be drawing a lot of comparisons between Music beta and Cloud Player, since Amazon was the first major service to market and I have been using it for a while to stream music. The real question is whether or not Google’s service is good enough to make me switch.

What is Music beta by Google?

Music beta is Google’s answer to music in the cloud. Much like Amazon’s service, you can upload music to stream online or sync with your Android device. There is one huge difference between Amazon’s and Google’s though: space.

Amazon give you 5GB of space for free. That is equivalent to 1,000 to 2,000 songs depending on length and format. Google, on the other hand, does not assign an amount of space in GB to your music library, they simply give you enough space for 20,000 songs.

I don’t know about you, but I only have 7,500 songs in my library and I definitely don’t listen to them all. However, just like when GMail came out in 2004 offering 2GB of space where most email clients offered less than 100MB, Google is offering a lot more space than the competition.

It’s rumored that on June 6th, Apple is announcing their cloud music app, so we’ll see what they have to offer.

Uploading Music

Uploading music to Music beta is super easy. Download the Music Manager app for your computer, and select where you want the music to be uploaded from.

As you can see, you can choose (on a Mac at least) from iTunes, your specific Music folder, or other folders where you may keep your music. Once you select your source, you can go to the Advanced tab to decide how often you want your music uploaded and how fast.

One issue I have with the music uploader is (at least with my ISP) it crushes bandwidth. I’ve noticed considerable slower download times while using Google’s Music Manager. This can probably be quelled by changing the “Bandwidth available for uploading.”

The great thing about setting Music Manager to upload automatically is playlist syncing, a feature that is missing from Amazon’s uploader. I change my playlists pretty often, and the fact that with Music beta I don’t have to worry about re-syncing is clutch.

Using Music beta

The User Experience (UX) isn’t all that different from Cloud Player’s. Music beta kind of looks like a mix between that and the online Android Market. I found using the web app to be very enjoyable.

On the left hand side, you’ll see your music organized into five different categories: New and recent, Songs, Artists, Albums, and Genres. This is pretty standard. It is worth noting that when using Music beta, it’s worth while to check the New and  recent view even if you haven’t uploaded anything in a while, because when you sign up, Google asks you what your music preferences are, and will throw you free songs from the genres you choose.

The above screenshot showcases a feature from the next set of links on the left hand side in Music beta: Auto Playlists. Similar to iTunes’ Smart Playlists, Auto Playlists are automatically populated with songs that meet a certain criteria. Right now you have three: Thumbs Up, which is a list of songs you give a favorable rating to, Recently add, and Free songs. There doesn’t seem to be a way to create your own. This is something I hope they add in the future.

Instant Mixes, next on the list, is Google answer to iTunes Genius. Select a song, press the plus button next to “Instant Mixes,” and you have a list of songs similar to the one you selected. While I did see one “study” (read: one guy messing around with Music beta and iTunes) stating the Genius is considerably better, I don’t see anything that would indicate that. I was actually very impressed with Google’s Instant Mixes, considering how young the service is.

One thing I really like about Music beta is the way it displays multiple albums by Artist, and multiple artists by Genre. It will “stack” all of the album art one on top of another, so you can view multiple albums or artists at the same time.

Listening to Music

You didn’t think I’d leave out the most important part, did you? I really like Music beta’s “Now Playing” bar. I think it’s a lot cleaner and sleeker than Cloud Player’s. It also gracefully shrinks as your browser window shrinks, which is a nice touch!

Music beta wouldn’t be much of a Google app without a list of great keyboard shortcuts, which are ubiquitous throughout all of Google’s web apps. While they aren’t advertised on the site (generally shortcuts aren’t), I did go looking for a list and came up with this:

This is a really nice touch, makes the UX a lot better, and is something that’s missing from Amazon Cloud Player.

You can actually get keyboard shortcuts for Cloud Player using the Chrome extension KeyMazony.

Settings

Music beta has a very simple Settings panel where you can do four things: Join the email list, Report a problem, Withdraw from the service, and Manage your devices.

I think the “Manage My Devices” is a nice touch reminiscent of Netflix, because Google knows you’ll be using their service over several devices- at least one computer, and possibly several mobile devices. You can deauthorize any device from here. Adding a device as as simple as downloading the app to that device and signing in with your Google Account.

Conclusion

So it seems my fanboydom came out a bit in this glowing review; however, Music beta isn’t perfect. I’d really like to see the ability to create your own Auto Playlists and do things like switch between different views (song list, album art, etc) like you can do in iTunes. I also like that when you purchase music on Amazon, it gets added to Cloud Player automatically (not that you can buy music on Google right now). The last thing I’d like to see (and it’s a big one) is the ability to download music to a computer, not just a mobile device. After searching the site and the help section, I couldn’t find a way to do it. That being said, with the amount of space Google gives you, a sleek interface, auto-syncing, and the fact that they literally are giving away music gives Music beta by Google a huge edge over the competition.