Google Music hits the UK

[smilodon]

With very little fan-fair Google have released Play Music to the UK. The basic idea is that a Google user can upload 20,000 songs to Google Play and stream the music back down to any connected device they own. This is probably designed to work with Android devices and the Google Play Store but I'm impressed just for the fact that I can back up my entire music collection on-line for no cost. I have about 7500+ titles which comes in at about 43gb. I'd need a paid subscription to a Dropbox account etc to be able to store that much data but with Google it appears to be completely free.

Another nice touch is that if Google can identify your albums it will add you music directly from your own library rather than actually upload it from you PC (Google call it scan and match) and it seems to be working now, so syncing the whole 43gb was done over night. It's probably wise to keep the stuff you want to listen to on your Android device on the SD card as I imagine streaming music over a 3G connection might hammer data allowances a bit. There's also interesting stuff like sharing music with Google + users so they can have one listen to a track you own and hopefully buy it themselves if they like it.

I'm not sure how much I'll be streaming music around my PC's and laptops but as an off site storage option for a big music library it seems a great idea.

https://play.google.com/about/music/

http://news.cnet.com/8301-1023_3-57542025-93/google-music-to-launch-free-scan-and-match-next-month/

[smilodon]

After a conversation yesterday with TL about the Google Play Music service there seem to be a few issues that might need consideration.

1. While there is no limit on the number of times a song can be streamed to your devices and you can link quite a few devices to your account you can only physically download songs twice from the Google web interface i.e. through a browser. So as a method for downloading a few albums to a mobile phone or MP3 player it has it's limitations and you'll still need to keep a local copy to USb to your phone or mp3 player. There are many situations where you may not have WiFi and so will either have to stream music over a 3G connection or keep stuff locally on your device. This limits the usefulness of Google Music. However there is no limit on restoring music via the desktop upload/download app. So you could still recover your music collection from a hard drive failure for example, but would have to download the whole collection rather than specific tracks. Therefore as a disaster recovery option it still has a use.

2. Price. I've checked a few album prices and while hardly a definitive comparison they seem more expensive on Google than they do on Amazon for example. Florence and the Machines latest offering is £6.99 on Google but £3.99 on Amazon. It's not a comprehensive check but Google are mostly the same price as Amazon, sometimes more expensive and only very occasionally cheaper. However regardless of where stuff is bought it can still be uploaded straight to Google Play. So I can buy from Amazon and store with Google. Amazon only offer free space for 250 songs. The songs you buy from them don't count towards the 250 limit and more space can be paid at £15.00 a year for 250,000 tracks. Google is free for 20,000 tracks

3. File formats. Google play won't accept and upload .m4a or .some .wma files. I assume it's because they carry DRM features and Google are legally not allowed to copy them to their severs etc. It's simple enough to convert to .mp3 but with a big music collection it could be a pain. Also some .wma files seem to upload fine and others don't so it might be hard to keep track of which of your .wma format  songs are uploaded and which aren't.

4.The music match feature is flakey. Google claim that if they have an album on their service that you wish to upload they will simply take their copy and add it to your catalogue. So you don't actually need to upload the files one by one. I certainly had this happen to a lot of my stuff but about half my albums (100) didn't get recognised and had to be uploaded file by file.

5. Tag's. Google sometimes splits an album in two due to badly formed ID3 tags. If you have a very messy music collection you might find the uploaded music doesn't sort neatly into album / artists etc. I'm a sad act who checks every album with the free MP3Tag app but still found some albums duplicated with most songs in one album and a rogue track in a second duplicate copy. Re doing the tags and letting Google re upload the music seems to fix the problem.

Google Play music is still a good way to get a big music collection backed up off site for free, but setting it up initially might be more work that people are willing to do. I've now got everything properly set up in Google Music but it took an evenings work and a few re uploads of problem albums. Plus I'm a saddo about getting tags set up from the start as I import/buy/rip my music. Still it's well worth a look and streaming stuff to my phone (on wifi) is great as I've too much music to fit on a single SD card.