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Google Music Beta

post #1 of 18
Thread Starter 

Looks like Google is planning on releasing a cloud music player soon and it's already in Beta. I requested an invitiation to use the Beta and will hopefully be able to try it out soon. I love the idea of having my full library anywhere I go and it looks like a great interface.

 

http://music.google.com/about/

 

 

 

Quote:

Google Music, the streaming music answer to Amazon, MOG and Rdio, is here (in beta form). You can access music in the cloud and stream to devices. But unlike MOG and Rdio, you can only play what you upload.

Google Music is less streaming music service, and more storage locker. You upload your tracks using a desktop client for Windows and Mac, and you can manage those tracks via a simple, clean UI on your computer, smartphone or tablet. Sure, you don't get access to millions of tracks, but if you already have a good library, you get access to the music you want. Here's a look at some of its features:

• Library Upload: With the Music Manager app, you can upload your iTunes or Windows Media Player libraries with one click. You can also upload by file or folder.

• Offline Listening: It's a pretty standard feature, but Google's gives this feature a neat twist by automatically caching songs you've recently listened to. I'd also love to see them do this for most listened songs. And of course, you can also cache specific songs you select.

• Seamlessness: Any change you make to your Google Music library on one device is automatically pushed to other devices.

• Playlists: Once you upload your tracks to the Google Music cloud, you can play around with it just like it was in a music app. That means playlists which automatically sync across all your connected devices. They also have a smart playlist feature called instant mix, which will automatically build a list for you based on one song. It's like iTunes' genius or Pandora's recommendation bot. Google says that they have servers actually listening to the songs to make their playlist selection.

Google Music is currently in beta, but you can request to get earlt access right here (and if selected, you can upload 20,000 tracks for free! FREEEEEEEEEE!)

http://gizmodo.com/5800408

post #2 of 18

This is great.

 

Requested an invitation moments after it was announced on the live stream. Any ideas on how the invitations will be granted? First-come, account seniority, etc?

 

The other announcements are also exciting. Andriod @ Home, ADK, and Ice Cream Sandwich!

post #3 of 18

Interesting idea, especially for listening to music at work - wouldn't need a dedicated external hard drive sitting on my desk any more.

post #4 of 18

US only

 

honestly google, doing that is a sure fire way to piss off people

post #5 of 18

Wonder if it scans each track to find out if it was a pirated track

post #6 of 18

Nah, what if it was music that we ripped ourselves?

Looks really interesting to me too.  Hopefully it won't be a flop like some of Google's other attempts.

post #7 of 18

I´m not using it for the moment...

post #8 of 18

I wonder what the size limit is.  And does it play nicely with all formats?

post #9 of 18

Did anyone ever get an invite?

post #10 of 18

U.S. only?  That's weak. :P

post #11 of 18

"We're sorry. Music Beta is currently only available in the United States"

 

sorry, right

post #12 of 18
Quote:
Originally Posted by sari0n View Post

Did anyone ever get an invite?


Not yet. I heard it may be a while though. Unless someone else has received one already...

post #13 of 18

Got an invite today. Wasn't at Google I/O, don't have a Xoom, do have an Android phone though.

 

They limit the uploads to 20k songs, no size limit as far as I can tell. In the middle of uploading my 60gb of music... this could take awhile, but listening to what I have uploaded, seems to mostly work as advertised. Some of the album art isn't showing up, but otherwise not too many complaints. Music is also showing up as it's uploaded to my phone, which means that since I sync-ed part of my collection to my phone's sd card, I'm seeing a lot of duplicates in my library.

 

I haven't really messed around with the formats, but I see the following from http://www.ghacks.net/2011/05/11/google-music-beta-invite-only-cloud-based-music-service/:

Quote:
On the music side of things, mp3, aac, flac and wma files are supported. All other music formats are not supported, which may be especially problematic for Apple users who may have part of their music collection in m4p and m4a format. Flac users need to know that Google will re-encode their files to 320 kbps mp3s.

 

post #14 of 18
I also just got an invite. I'll let you guys know how it goes.
post #15 of 18

any one had any trouble uploading some things?  ivo had 7 songs refuse to upload, all it says is error uploading.  they are in aac, is the bit rate too high? 

 

also when uploading there seemed to be rather a lot of cpu usage going on was it transcoding stuff on the fly?  i dont see anything that says they do that other than if you upload flac stuff it will transcode to 320k mp3's.

 

any thoughts or help?

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