Music Management: Amazon Mp3 or Google Music or Convert&Copy over from PC?

[SonDan]

Hello Nexus7 Users,

I am so loving my new Nexus 7 32Gb with 3G tablet. It is a major upgrade from my two year old original Samsung Galaxy Tab with Froyo.

I have got my home screens and apps in order now and am ready now to deal with the music issue.
I stream using Sirius, Tune In, IheartMusic, Pandora and Slacker -- but I want to listen to my own music too.

My huge music collection is on my computer hard drive and it is made up of my frequent Amazon purchases and
my collection of digitized CDs and LPs (I have yet to rip my any of my cassettes or the remainder of my vinyl)

The cloud is something I have not dabbled in yet me and I know that I have it available to me on both Amazon and Google but need to research it a bit more.
I also am investigating converting non MP3s to transfer to either my Nexus hardware or the cloud -- but again, I am unsure where to move the music too.

Any Amazon MP3 app users here? When you download the music where is it stored on the Nexus. Or do you download to your pc and then transfer?
Is it easy to get the tunes from your Nexus to your PC for backup purposes?

Any Google Music Cloud users? Other than only being able to listen to the music when online are their other disadvantages?
I would love to hear what others are doing to give me some ideas.

Thanks for reading and I appreciate any and all suggestions offered to me here while I continue my research into this topic.

 

[hichris123]

With Google Music, you can 'offline cache' your music, so you can listen offline.

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[SonDan]

Thanks hiChris. Any1 know if Amazon will cache too?

 

[B. Diddy]

I go with Google Music, because you can store up to 20,000 songs free. With Amazon, you can only store up to 250 non-Amazon songs free, and have to pay $25/yr in order to get full storage (up to 250,000 songs). If you forget to pay or if you stop paying, I'm not quite sure what happens to your non-Amazon songs--I'm guessing they warn you to back them up, then zap them.

I happen to think the Google Play Music player on Android is pretty good. It may not be flashy, but there are some decent features, including a good customizable equalizer, and pretty good playlist functionality. The main drawback is that Google and Android still have some problems with ID3 tag information. If you have an album with songs by various artists, it will list the album artist as the artist of the last track. Not sure why they can't fix this, because it seems pretty simple.

Most of my songs are ripped from CDs. It can take a long time to upload your entire library to Google (it takes about 20-30 seconds per song), but it's worth it.

 

[mr_nobody]

I voted for other because I use subsonic to run my own personal music cloud.

 

[phattysalz]

I would recommend Google Music. I tried both services side-by-side for a year when Amazon gave you 20gb free for a year. Amazon does let you download albums locally to your phone Fyi. I liked Google overall better:

-I like the interface better on the phone for Google.
-I like the Google Music Manager on the desktop for keeping the tunes in sync.
-sometimes (not often, but enough to annoy me) Amazon MP3 would have buffer issues when streaming even when on a fast wifi connection.

To me, the sound quality is the same. I think Google uses a higher bitrate, but I think it is negligible. I'm not an audiophile and for my uses they sound the same. I also believe Amazon will replace your music on their servers with higher bit rate encodings. I couldn't hear a difference but may help if some of your music is encoded at lower rates.

Amazon is definitely a good mp3 service, however it is not free (above 5gb) and I happen to like Google Music better. I still buy mp3 albums on Amazon if they are on sale but I'll download it to the desktop and let it sync to Google.

You could just upload some music to the free 5gb plan on Amazon and try both services to see what you like better.

Hope this helps!


Sent from my Galaxy Nexus using Tapatalk 2

 

[DogPsyche]

Google Play Music works terrific. From a loyalty point of view if they're gonna let me store my entire music collection - heck the equivalent of my entire street's music collection - for free (as opposed to Amazon's paltry 250 songs), I'm gonna go with Google.

~Jaqi~
Sent from my lovely Nexus 7

 

[SonDan]

Thank you for those details B Diddy.
That is most useful info.
Is it possible to correct those mislabeled mp3s ?

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[SonDan]

Thank you so much phatty. Seems like Google music has the edge. Think I will take you up on that good suggestion and upload 3 songs to each and download one song from each and see how I fare.


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[SonDan]

Thank you Jaqi for your input.
BTW, kewl signature on you Nexus

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[SonDan]

Phatty,

Since you used Amazon before perhaps you could answer this ---

I use Shazam whenever I am out and hear a new song I like. A link is offered up, after the song is identified, to purchase it from Amazon.
If I use Google Music and downloaded this song from Amazon to the Nexus 7, where would the song be stored? Would it go into my Google music cloud?
Or would it end up in its own Amazon music folder that it would create?

Wanted to check with you before I tried it out on my own.
Thanks for reading,.

 

[ultravisitor]

It can take a long time to upload your entire library to Google (it takes about 20-30 seconds per song), but it's worth it.

Yep. It took an entire week of nonstop uploading to upload my entire digital library to Google, but it was very much worth it--especially when my hard drive failed a year ago. Now whenever I get new music, Google Music Manager only takes a few minutes to upload the new songs, and then my Google Music collection is up to date.

 

[B. Diddy]

Thank you for those details B Diddy.
That is most useful info.
Is it possible to correct those mislabeled mp3s ?

Sent from my Nexus 7 using Tapatalk 2

There's no easy way if you want to use Google Play Music as your player. The only workaround I can think of would be to change the artist of the last track of a compilation album to "Various Artists" so that it would list that as the artist of the album, but then you'd mess up the info of that last track.

There are a few 3rd party players that do a better job. MortPlayer is free and uses the folder hierarchy to label albums and artists. PowerAmp is a paid app, but is supposed to be one of the best players on the market. Both can only access music stored locally on your phone, not the cloud.

 

[MJKearney]

If I use Google Music and downloaded this song from Amazon to the Nexus 7, where would the song be stored? Would it go into my Google music cloud?
Or would it end up in its own Amazon music folder that it would create?

I don't think that you can currently sync music files between your Nexus 7 and Google Music cloud storage. So if you download a song to your N7 after purchasing it from Amazon, you can't then upload it to Google. You'll need to first transfer it to your computer, or re-download to your computer from Amazon.

On your computer, you'll install Music Manager from Google. In Music Manager you'll choose which folders on your computer to sync with Google's cloud storage service. This is what allows you to upload your music library to Google. Once it's on their servers, you can then wirelessly access it from your N7. Of course, you can also keep the song locally on your N7 if you prefer.

Of course, if you've purchased from Amazon, you can just use their app called Amazon MP3 (available on the Google Play Store) to stream the song to your N7 instead of downloading it.

 

[quarky_uk]

I use Google Play.

I had tag issues when uploading but once set, all is fine. Tags can be corrected from a web browser. There's is also the ability to set an artist fired the track as well as one for the album it comes from. Seems to work pretty well all told.

Generally though I would say, upload a few albums, check the tagging (a few songs will almost certainly be wrong), rinse, repeat.

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[natehoy]

I use Google Play.
Generally though I would say, upload a few albums, check the tagging (a few songs will almost certainly be wrong), rinse, repeat.

I haven't found an easy way to upload a few albums. As soon as I tell Google Music Manager to find my music, it starts uploading everything. I've just set it on the slowest setting possible (which is still very near the top speed of my Internet upload) and resigned myself to a week or so of waiting for everything to arrive.

 

[anon(847090)]

why go paid when you can go free. with additional features and better service.

 

[ybcthanerd]

I use both. U said u have bought music from amazon well as long as u bought it from them they put it in ur cloud wit no space takin from ur totsl space and yes amazon has offline cache. So use amazon to store tha music u bought and google music to store tha rest

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[B. Diddy]

I should clarify that the problem with Google Play Music not being able to list the album artist correctly for compilation albums is limited to the Android app for music stored locally on an SD card. The Google cloud can actually identify it correctly, and if you are only accessing music from the cloud, the app will list it correctly.

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[quarky_uk]

I haven't found an easy way to upload a few albums.

You can tell out to upload a specific folder. So I have one called "ripped" and I just chuck albums in there. I did tell it to do the entire drive first but ran into issues with as he'll of a lot of incorrectly tagged files.

I have downloaded music before instead of ripping it (lazy I know), and it amazes me how wrong people can get tags. Idiots.


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