Long ago, before the clouds began forming above the computing landscape, there was a legend that circulated through the interwebs and past my open ears. That legend was of the coming of Google music.
For what feels like years, but in reality was probably closer to a year, I waited for Google to push through their cloud-based music service offering. And one day, at long last, it arrived.
Having waited for this moment for so long, I held off on posting any sort of review of the service until I was sure I knew precisely how I felt about it.
It seems that time has arrived.
Let’s get the dirt out of the way first — uploading your music is going to suck. Google, who at the time of this post does not have a deal with the four major music labels, lacks the matching capability Apple is prepared to offer (wherein Apple simply sees you own a song and allows you access to a perfect version of that song from their own server.) As far as I can tell, Google is really pulling your music up to their servers, and it’s going to take a very, very long time. My collection took days and days to finish uploading, and trust me — to an even more serious collector, my collection is a drop in the pond. (Editor’s Note: Like my massive 1 terrabye collection of music)
If you have a large enough collection, there will be a temptation to give up on uploading halfway through the process. Don’t give up, because when you do make it through the uploading process, the real magic begins.
I’ve also found that some of my music was either uploaded twice, or the music seems to not have uploaded successfully. Not a deal breaker, but not good.
However, once the music is up, music.google.com can act as your iTunes, and it has every song in your entire library. Whenever you can reach the internet, you have access to everything. The UI takes an intuitive, no-frills approach, and for the most part works without trouble. This is not so different from other locker services, you get the gist — it works (at least as well as you would expect a beta to work.)
In addition to the web service, I also have the app on my Android device, which is where things get even more awesome. From my experience, music seems to sync from the cloud to my phone effortlessly and reasonably close to instantly. You can pin specific songs or playlists to download for offline use, or let the app figure out what you’re trying to listen to and intelligently cache as you’re using the app.
In terms of UI, once again I’m a big fan of this app. The background color changes as you switch songs to better match the album art, and once again the UI was reasonably intuitive.
Playback has been flawless for me so far on all music that didn’t have a problem uploading (as mentioned earlier.) The app features your standard shuffle as well as a wonderful iTunes genius playlist rippoff that has done a good job for me so far.
When traveling in areas that loose 3G coverage, the app does sometimes seem to have trouble recognizing when we have re-entered 3g and stays offline, which ocasionally requires a phone restart to fix (app killers did not seem to do the trick.) Then again, that seems to be a recurring theme of my Droid2 (Verizon) so we might be able to chalk that issue up to the carrier or the hardware.
It also bears mentioning that the music app looks gorgeous and works flawlessly on my wifi-only Motorola Xoom tablet – a major selling point of both products in my opinion.
Both the app and the service are free for now, but it remains to be seen how long that will last. For now, for what you’re paying (nothing) Google’s music service is a steal, and works quite well for a beta. I use the Google music app on my phone as my primary mobile music listening device, and despite some recurring frustrations, have not looked back.
I give the Google music service a 9 for delivering on what it promises just slightly better than you’d expect for a beta, and for flawlessly (and attractively) syncing across all Google devices, all while being free for an unlimited amount of music. If Google starts capping uploads or streams, or puts a price tag on the service, they better be prepared to iron out the rough edges. On the other hand, with the unveiling of Google+ the possibilities for social integration are limitless. The only thing that can stop Google Music from being a serious threat in the cloud music service field is Google hurting themselves. In the meantime, I’d hunt down a beta invite and enjoy it while it’s free.
Post by Alex Horowitz
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