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Google Play Music- Lossless to MP3

post #1 of 6
9/25/12 at 2:55pm
Thread Starter 

Mods/Admins - Decided to put this here in the portable section as this relates to all android players.

 

Google play has had music storage for quite some time but was never intrested in it. My brother actually convinced me to give it a try as I have lots of space in lossless music but his collection puts me to shame (He has about 60,000+ songs mostly focused on classical music).

 

So I took the dive.

 

Google play uses Google Music Manager to upload music from your PC to Google play. The format of the source is irrelevant. I have used both FLAC and WMA lossless (I know it does not support ALAC) and "Google" will automatically convert them to MP3 320k and download the appropiate cover art. So far it has even found some very very obscure CD's without any issue (ie Racer-X. For anyone that is not familiar, this is Paul Gilbert's first foray into Guitar Shredding).

 

The storage is cloud based so regardless of device. If you have access to Google Play (even on the web it works), you can access all your "MP3". On Android you have the capability of downloading the MP3 to your device for offline playing.

 

For comparison, it would be iTunes+iCloud

 

Once uploaded and converted, you can download the converted MP3 with album art emdedded in the MP3 along with tags. Currently not sure what MP3 tags they use.

 

I will warn you, Currently 100GB worth of music is at 2 days and counting. If you have a cap on bandwidth from your ISP, You WILL chew it in no time flat.


Edited by figgie - 9/27/12 at 12:27am
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post #2 of 6
9/25/12 at 6:06pm

I was just wondering about this very topic. Thanks for the info.

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post #3 of 6
9/25/12 at 6:26pm

Yep I did the same.  It's great to have my entire library in the cloud for easy access.  However, note that you have to convert your lossless ALAC files first if you have any, GMusic does not support uploading them:

(http://support.google.com/googleplay/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=1100462).  

 

There is a "high quality" streaming option in the Play Music app in Android that you should turn on as well if you have a decent signal or are on wifi.

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post #4 of 6
9/26/12 at 5:57am

I've done this too. It takes days to upload a large library even with a good wifi connection, but the result is worth the wait. The 20,000 track limit- with no cap on actual amount of data- is extremely generous, and the quality of the streamed audio is indistinguishable from the stuff that's actually on my SD card (everything I have is either 256 kbps AAC rips or 320 kbps MP3 purchased music, and that's exactly what went up to the cloud and what streams back to my phone; indistinguishable from CD quality to my ears, even through my very revealing Ety HF5s). I stream only when wifi is available, but when it is (including playing music through my stereo at home- who needs CDs?) it's great to have available a virtually unlimited supplement to what fits on my SD card. With this available, I will now rip a lot more CDs that I hadn't previously planned to do; eventually, all of them. Bravo, Google.


Edited by supersleuth - 9/26/12 at 6:34am
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post #5 of 6
9/26/12 at 7:47am
Thread Starter 

I have been doing some listening and agree.. indistinguishable from the CD itself.

 

I myself do use Cell signal for this.. Let see how fast I eat 5GB. ;)

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post #6 of 6
9/26/12 at 8:51am
Quote:
Originally Posted by figgie View Post

I have been doing some listening and agree.. indistinguishable from the CD itself.

 

I myself do use Cell signal for this.. Let see how fast I eat 5GB. ;)

Unfortunately I get only half that before Virgin would throttle me to dialup-like speeds, so it's wifi or bust for me. But that's why I have a 32 GB SD card in my phone!

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