Google stealthily coalesces UK music cloud into being
Maybe it's on my phone already? Do I care? Probably not
Agentless Backup is Not a Myth
Google has quietly yet finally brought its cloud-based music service to the UK.
It's part of Google Play, which is Google's continuing makeover of the scruffy Android Marketplace into a slick cloud storage and playback service for books and mags, movies and music. The magazine department isn't ready yet in the UK, but now the music section is.
There's two parts to the service. One is an online locker that can hold up to 20,000 tunes for playback anywhere. A helper app for Windows or Mac scans your iTunes folder, or folders of your choice, for files to copy to the cloud. On our test rig it picked out iTunes playlists and offered to upload them individually - but not iTunes Smart Playlists.
Google Play - no sign of Scan and Match here
Uploading is tedious. Although Google is supposed to offer a scan-and-match service, it actually isn't. Scan and match, where it does work, populates your cloud locker with a decent quality copy of your songs it identifies, but from its own cloud servers. (Decent quality, relatively speaking.)
This means each song doesn't have to be piped up across a slow uplink; when a song is identified, the software just copies the data between the cloud servers as the music is already over there. This is built into Apple's iTunes in the Cloud. Our test uploads to Google Play maxed out the smartphone's 3G uplink at 200kbit/s.
The second part is an online DRM-free download store, offering songs at prices closer to Amazon's than Apple's. The xx's Coexist costs £6.49 from Google and Amazon, and £7.99 from iTunes; the new Robbie Williams album costs £7.99 from Google, £7,49 from Amazon and £11.99 from iTunes. The latest Rolling Stones greatest hits package Grrr! costs £11.49 from Google, and £12.99 from iTunes. We had difficulties in previewing tracks, however, even using bog-standard FireFox.
Overall, it's probably good enough for Android devices, but not compelling enough to lure Kindle owners away from Amazon's store nor iPad owners from iTunes. ®
COMMENTS
Re: Good idea, poorly executed
LOL, I will give you a clue as to where the problem is...
"ripped in a codec that Google Play Music doesn't support. I used Apple Lossless "
Note the APPLE bit. You ripped all your music into a Apple proprietary format, and expect someone that's not Apple to care? I have recently come to the conclusion Apple owners are too stupid to understand the word "proprietary", and what the resulting problems are...
You could of course ripped it into FLAC, and everything would have been fine. All Android devices like FLAC lossless, as does the music uploader...
My favourite example of this on Spotify is from Cee Lo Green's The Lady Killer track 3, the wonderful ditty entitled "Fuck You". There are two versions of the album on Spotify, one with clean lyrics ("Forget you"), one with the original. The original sweary version is entitled 'F**k you', the clean version is entitled 'Fuck you (clean)'.
Re: Good idea, poorly executed
Hey fanboi, why use a proprietary codec like ALAC, when there is FLAC, which has way more support, including your precious Sonos and Google Play Music Manager...?
Seems like you're blaming other people for your bad decisions.
IT infrastructure monitoring strategies
Requirements Checklist for Choosing a Cloud Backup and Recovery Service Provider
Cloud based data management
Enabling efficient data center monitoring
Agentless Backup is Not a Myth
