Having to sync all your music between devices is a bit annoying stuff. Few days ago, Google launched a new music service Google Music that lets you upload your personal music collection to the cloud from which you can play them from anywhere directly on computer and Android devices.
This service is now in beta mode and invitation based for the United States users only. I managed to get the invitation yesterday night and uploaded around 330 songs from my library. This article gives a sneak peak of this next generation cloud service.
The invitation looks simple briefing the outline of the whole Google Music with a single ‘Getting Started’ button:
Once you sign in with your Google account, after some license agreements, you are asked to select genres you would like to have in your music library:
Once you select the genres (you can select all), the next step asks you to download a music manager from which you can add songs on your computer to the cloud. Its just a simple desktop app:
From this music manager, you can add your entire music library, or desired folders or whatever you want. You can even skip this step and go to your online library directly.
Once installed, the desktop music manager automatically scans your local computer library and gives you a window to upload into your Google Music.
Depending on your Internet connection speed, it takes few hours to upload your songs. Once upload is finished, your Google Music page shows all songs categorized in artists, albums, genres and also new and recent. This manager will watch your iTunes or Windows Media Player library for changes, so your online library is always up-to-date
If you carefully observe above screenshot, you can different set of buttons like Previous song, Play, Next song, Shuffle songs, Repeat songs, Volume.
Pros:
You can also create new playlists and instant mixes.
One of the best desktop webapp – fast, easy to use and some cool extra features
Currently Free while in beta and you can upload up to 20,000 songs (thats more than required!)
Android app is also pretty good with some neat album art views and the ability to download songs for offline playback.
Cons:
It is currently only available on Android devices – so iPhone lovers and other mobile devices are completely left out.
Not sure whether the service will be free once out of beta
There are leading players in the market already similar to Google Music service. Some of them are Amazon Cloud Player, iCloud (very soon from Apple!), Subsonic, mSpot, Spotify, Rdio, Grooveshartk.
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