Today I finally got to test Google Music. After 6 months of beta testing the service now opened to all users. Though you have to be in the U.S. to register an account, but thanks to proxies and VPN connections it easy to “be” in the U.S. at least with the internet-connection. If you have no idea how Proxies work, you can find a good guide at engadget.com. (Note: you only need the American IP during registration!)
Typical cloud application, you can listen to your uploaded music collection (max 20,000 files) from any computer, tablet, mobile phones and other Internet-enabled device. But an Internet connection is required for this cost-free service.
After registering you can get going. At the beginning you can to upload your own music into the cloud with the co called “Music Manager”.
The Music Manager is a simple application which scans, on your approval, your music collection on iTunes or a selected folder and uploades them to your Google Music Account. There you can find a copy of your music collection, without asking whether they are purchased or fallen from the truck.
I’ve stopped uploading my collection after half an hour, which corresponded to about 50 songs.
Once the songs are in the cloud, you can listen to them at will, but you can’t download them again. At least I did not find the option for this.
Your songs are automatically sorted by artist, album and genre, so you can quickly search your way through a major collection and quickly find the desired song. (So, there is also a searchbox available.)
The playback options do not offer big surprises. In addition to the shuffle and repeat function you find the possibility of likeing and dislikeing your spongs. You also can create playlists. These can either be thrown together by yourself, or you can suggest one with “Instant Mix”.
This “Instant Mixes” feature is one of the nice comfort features in Google Music. You choose a song and click on “Instant Mix”. In seconds, the program creates a playlist of similar or matching songs and makes them available to you.
Though I had no great expectations in Google Music, but I was still a bit disappointed at the end. Although I could listen to my songs in best quality on my tablet, but in my opinion the cloud is not the best storage for my music library. But this is exactly what Google Music is. The files you usually only have on your PC are now somewhere on the Internet, available to you 24/7.
It may be that my opinion is a bit distorted because I am a long-standing Grooveshark user, but i just miss the feature of further recommendations in Google Music. So my decision has been made.
For all others who want to have access to their private music collection from everywhere, I can recommend Google Music because of the simple user interface and intuitive control. For everyone else I say take a look at Grooveshark.com.
