Google Music Beta

Bailarge

Well-known member
Feb 11, 2011
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I just got the invite today and gave it a whirl. Anyone else? I've noticed already that I may not use it as much as someone with, say, a Dinc, mainly because of the extra 32gb that the T-Bolt comes with. I wouldn't really want to oversaturate my music experience with lots of superfluous music that I play once in a blue moon and probably won't enjoy in the first place. So why put it in the cloud when I can keep it on my phone directly? My music is backed up on my computer and a spare hard drive anyways.

The program itself is okay. It seems slick on my computer.But since it is web-based, you can't do things that I'm used to from iTunes, like right-clicking and deleting something right away. There's a little arrow to the right of every song/album that let's you do it, but I don't know if I'll get used to it.

None of the songs that I uploaded to Google Music is showing on the Google Music Player App, though. So that's rendered it useless thus far. And the app is okay, better than the Amazon MP3 app. But at least I could play cloud songs on the Amazon one.

The music seems to upload pretty quickly, but the actual "Music Manager" program that you use to upload is junk. It needs work. They give you the option to upload from iTunes, from "My Music" or from specific folders. And from Windows Media Player, for the three of you out there that use it. But if you want specific songs only, you can't really do it. If you choose "My Music" it just scans the whole folder and goes to town. You can choose specific folders but that will take forever if you want to pick and choose, and again it's worthless if you just want a few songs here and there. I for one have a lot of songs that aren't part of albums, and I don't want to toss them into their own individual folders just to get them on Beta.

Wow I didn't realize I'd write this much. I guess this turned into a review of sorts. Well I guess my point is, between the 32gb memory card, Power Amp, and Pandora, I really don't see myself needing Google Music at all. They'll need to find a reason for me to want to use it for awhile. Any other T-Bolt users try it yet?
 
Got mine yesterday or the day before. I started downloading last night. Over 24 hours later, I am at 1,375 of 17,761 songs uploaded. This is going to take a LONG time...
 
Got mine yesterday.

I only uploaded about 100 songs. They uploaded quickly (bit it was a small amount), and showed up immediately online and on the android app. To the OP, make sure you download the new Google "music" app to see your songs.

Frankly, I hate iTunes. One of the reasons (among others) I refuse to buy an iPhone is because I absolutely will not install that bloated crapware on my computer. Having said that, the Google music app and online access isn't trying to replace something like iTunes...yet. it's just trying to provide a simple interface to allow you access your music "in the cloud" for a multitude of devices.

Excited to try it out...we'll see how it works out.
 
I downloaded the right app... It's just not happening. It asked me what email address it is supposed to be attached to and I selected the right one. Dunno what it is, but it's not showing anything but the songs on my phone. Regardless, it's not for me. Not yet. But that's why it's just beta, am I right?
 
I got my invite a while back. Although I got it going, I have had time to upload only a small portion of my music library on my computer (netbook). I haven't Played with the music player that much but it seems decent enough, considering it's still in beta. I wish Google made it compatible with third party players like Power Amp.

Uploading is real slow and I am not even bothering to play with the Music Manager.

What I like about iTunes/iPod is their ability to create Smart Playlist or Genius Playlist (I haven't owned an iPod for a while, I hope these functions are still there)

Sent from my ADR6400L using Tapatalk
 
I got my invite a while back. Although I got it going, I have had time to upload only a small portion of my music library on my computer (netbook). I haven't Played with the music player that much but it seems decent enough, considering it's still in beta. I wish Google made it compatible with third party players like Power Amp.

Uploading is real slow and I am not even bothering to play with the Music Manager.

What I like about iTunes/iPod is their ability to create Smart Playlist or Genius Playlist (I haven't owned an iPod for a while, I hope these functions are still there)

Sent from my ADR6400L using Tapatalk

Again...I've only uploaded a small amount of songs myself, but Google also has a "smart playlist" option of sorts with their service as well. (Pick a song, build a playlist based on it).

I uploaded ~100 songs and it took about 10 minutes. That doesn't seem that bad to me. I'm guessing if your songs are taking a long time to upload, the roadblock may be your internet connection. As we all know, upload speeds are always lower than download speeds on almost any ISP.

I also hope Google eventually provides an API to allow 3rd party vendors to utilize the service, but it's still quite early in the beta, so I don't expect that yet.
 
Yeah I got my invite a day or two after I/O. I actually like it a lot because it gives me a chance to listen to all my music while I close at work. I count a lot of money tithe end of night, I'm part of management at a cinema so I'm always in the office for hours sometimes and the chance to have a big selection without actually using up my phones memory is great for me. Some negatives are that I wish I could use it in the HTC native music app and take advantage of the srs dolby on the phone and volume could be louder. Also, I it still hasn't loaded all my songs into the cloud and I have circa 8,000 songs in itunes. I have an ipod but I don't bring it to work much, I keep it in the car. Sorry if this seems kinda hard to follow, just kinda wrote what came to mind.
 
Yeah I got my invite a day or two after I/O. I actually like it a lot because it gives me a chance to listen to all my music while I close at work. I count a lot of money tithe end of night, I'm part of management at a cinema so I'm always in the office for hours sometimes and the chance to have a big selection without actually using up my phones memory is great for me. Some negatives are that I wish I could use it in the HTC native music app and take advantage of the srs dolby on the phone and volume could be louder. Also, I it still hasn't loaded all my songs into the cloud and I have circa 8,000 songs in itunes. I have an ipod but I don't bring it to work much, I keep it in the car. Sorry if this seems kinda hard to follow, just kinda wrote what came to mind.

If you long-press an album or playlist, you can make it available offline. This will allow you to use whichever music app you prefer. Not the most elegant solution, but still a viable option, IMO, especially if you have 4G and can download an album in just a few minutes.
 
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Since the Google Music player also automatically adds all the audio files on the Sdcard (even the system wav files like aa, ma, etc) to the library I wish the "library option" had more than just two options - all music and offline only. And I could not even find a way to specify which folder on the sdcard I want to assign for the music library.

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it didn't add my system audio files.

to the op, i can't imagine getting much use out of this, considering the battery hit.
 
it didn't add my system audio files.

to the op, i can't imagine getting much use out of this, considering the battery hit.

What's the battery hit for listening to music "offline"? I wouldn't think it would be any different than the other music player.

I got my invite about a week ago. I'm at 3300 songs out of 5700 uploaded. Taking FOREVER! I will say that I initially uploaded two of my playlists and listened to them over Memorial Day weekend in the car for about a 4 hour trip. Only once did a song "skip". And when I got to my destination, my TB was fully charged...so obviously using Nav, Streaming music, and of course playing music wasn't too much of a drain for my power supply to keep up.

I'm very excited to get all my songs uploaded so I can free up memory on my SD card...then I'm going to fill it up with AVI movies!
 
On a side note....does anyone know of a plugin to get a keyboard with audio controls to work with your PC's Google Music Beta? I looked for one but couldn't find anything. While at work, I automatically go to the pause button anytime a phone call comes in...it's second nature now and annoying for it to not work;)
 
I'm starting to understand why someone would want to use this even if with the 32gb. I'm definitely simpler about it and prefer not to load it with movies or whatever so i dont need to free up space. And the site is blocked at my work. And I only have one computer. I guess I don't have a need for the cloud right now.
 
If you drive much, or have a long commute, its very nice. I like that the music pauses when receiving a phone call and resumes when ending the call. Seems obvious I know, but my Sirius XM App hasnt figured out how important that is yet. Almost ready to cancel my Sirius subscription over that idiocy.
 
got mine about 2 weeks ago (maybe that long?) and took me 4 days to upload 4100 songs.

the thing i'm excited about---or HOPING for--is integration with Google Voice Search/Commands.
as of now, saying "play artist MeWithoutYou" doesn't play music stored on the SD card/phone, but instead opens up an app that streams the artist from the internet--very often just one song of theirs & then it flips to a similar artist (like Pandora)
this is the stupidest thing ever.
HOPEFULLY, GoogleMusic allows integration with GoogleVoiceSearch to play music stored in the cloud so you can listen to all of your uploaded album/artist without music flipping to other unwanted "suggested" artists or songs that you have never heard before by the artist.

that, my friends, is why i'm keeping Music.
 
I'm really liking it. One advantage of the Thunderbolt is the included 32gb card. Those babies cost about $100 as of now, so I've held off replacing my Incredible 2's 16gb card. But I've got over 19gb of music, so I'd have to choose a subset to put on the card. That's a pain in the butt and I don't want to think about it or worry about space or switching things in and out. So cloud access is a dream.

It's taking a while to upload all the songs, but I've just been going in fits and starts, so that's understandable. Once it's all up, that'll be great. I was worried there'd be a gb limit like Amazon but there's not. And I wasn't sure how many songs I had but turns out it was only about 4,500. So I'll never hit the 20,000 song limit. Winner: Google.

One thing I can't figure out is how to turn off Google adding new new music to my collection. This was an option during setup that I figured I could change later. But now I can't find any option to turn it off. And most of the music they've given me is crap, even in the few genres I selected, so I want it to stop doing that. I've deleted most of it already but I assume they will periodically add more. Any ideas?

One thing I don't like is the tab interface at the top in portrait mode. I didn't realize I had more tabs out offscreen to the right until I clicked the right-most visible tab, which automatically shifted the view to the right. You can scroll through them with a horizontal swipe gesture once you realize that, but I think it's bad UI design. And when you switch to landscape, you get a different UI for tab selection - a dropdown. I think that inconsistency is bad too. It's not like you can't figure it out, but I think those two things are inelegant. And you'd think landscape, where there's room for more tabs horizontally, is where you'd see the tabs all laid out instead of a dropdown, but it's the opposite.

I will say that once this service goes paid, I won't use it. I hate subscription anything - it just bleeds you. It's harder to avoid such things these days I but I do wherever I can. And since you can just pay a one-time fee for a big enough card and then have room for all your music accessible anyway, that's what I'll end up doing once this goes paid. Until then though, this will be great.
 
I got the beta the day it came out as I am also a XOOM owner, but I haven't had a chance to use it yet. I am hoping to play with it this weekend.

I took the 2 minutes to setup the account and that's it...I haven't even installed the app on my computer.
 
literally just got my invite right now, installing the music manager on my mac and uploading my music!
 

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