Recently I was selected by Google to be a beta user of their new music service. While I was still holding out to be a chrome book tester, my second favorite thing to technology is music.
As soon as I got the email, I downloaded their Music Manager application, installed it and I was uploading music in no-time. In anticipation of being selected as a beta tester, I already had their Music application installed on my phone.
It took a few days to upload my 4,900 songs. Once I noticed that there were no more songs to upload (I only knew this after checking every so often), I anxiously launched the mobile phone app to see if my albums were there. All of my albums were there. Some things I did like was how everything was alphabetized and easy to find. A couple of things I didn't like were some of the album covers didn't resolve and there were duplicate albums of music that I had copied to my phone previously.
The mobile app has settings for streaming over wi-fi only, and download over wi-fi only. So I don't exceed the limits on my data plan, I setup the application to allow streaming over the data network, but not to allow downloading over the wi-fi. These settings have me feeling that if there is an album I really like, I can flag it for offline use, and then the next time I am on a wi-fi network, the album will be downloaded to my phone. So knowing this I flagged a whole bunch of albums and now have a pretty decent library on my phone. With the music mobile app, I can even toggle the library to display everything in my library, or just what I've made offline. The downloading of the music automatically starts and stops based on me being on a wi-fi network. The quality of the sound over both the data network and the wi-fi network is just fine but I've never been in an area with a poor signal while using it.
My full blown experience with Google Music Beta came this week. I got a Groupon email to order a live David Gray album for $6 that can be downloaded. Excitingly, I made the purchase. Once the Groupon was made available I quickly downloaded it and copied it to my My Music directory so the Google Music Manager could pick it up and upload it. As soon as I copied it over I started an upload from the Music Manager. I watched the songs upload and they appear to upload two at one time. After the songs uploaded, I noticed that two of the songs did not upload. The online help told me to run the troubleshooter. Disappointingly, the "run troubleshooter" didn't really troubleshoot at all but displayed the details of a log file. Nonetheless, the only error regarding the two songs that didn't download read that there was an error uploading. There was no additional information.
Anxiously, I played the album anyway, through my Chrome browser. The songs played fine, and I was able to give them all a thumbs up (similar to Pandora). The cool thing about Google's Thumbs Up is that it automatically creates a playlist of all of the songs you "Thumb Up".
Overall, I'm impressed with Google Music Beta thus far. Integrating into how I listen to music has been convenient, I just need to start remembering to make some stuff available offline. Now I get to look forward to all of the improvements Google plans to make to the service.
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