Google Music Beta Review The Promise & the Peril

I love to listen to music on my various gadgets, and I have a bunch, including some Android gadgets.  So once I got my invitation I was excited to try the new Google Music Beta.  It’s no secret to anyone who knows me that I am fed up with iTunes.  I am a Windows pc user and iTunes on Windows pcs just isn’t that great, in my humble, two-cents worth, opinion, which is another long story for another day.  I have used iPods and iTunes since 2003 and owned a half dozen iPods, so I have plenty of experience to speak from.  iTunes sucks.  So did I like Google Music?  Would I recommend it to others? Will it replace my iPod/iTunes solution that I have lived with for 8 years?  Let’s find out.

To listen to your music, delete your music, manage your playlists, edit song information, etc, you use the Music Player which is in every respect browser based.  So that means you must have an internet connection to do so.  Which I guess is the whole point.  There is a downside clearly to that, because if you don’t have an internet connection, you are sunk.   You have a search feature in the Player to quickly search for any song you have, which indeed I would expect being a Google product.  You can as well sort the view of your music by playlists, artists, albums, songs, etc.

The time downloaded the Android app from the Market

After I uploaded all my music I at the time downloaded the Android app from the Market and fired it up.  And I guess this is where my frustration began with Google Music.  The Android app is really Beta. It needs updating, like now.  Compared to the Amazon Cloud Music player app, this app is just pitiful in my view.  Above all, the app combed my Android phone for music files to see if it could add any files.  It found all sorts of sound files on my phone that are associated with apps installed on my phone.  So there are tons of 1 and 2 second sound files from game apps on my phone that are now sitting inside my Google Music app.  In other words just not cool.

In addition, the app wouldn’t show me the songs from my Google Music collection in other words now sitting inside Google Music. Afterwards poking around the sparse help files I found out that you have to set up your phone to ‘auto-sync’ to be able to see your music.   Afterwards the app ‘syncs’ and you can see your music, you can turn off auto-sync.  Nevertheless if I add more music to Google Music I assume that I’ll have to turn auto-sync back on previously the app can see the new music.  Again, not cool.  I shouldn’t have to turn on ‘auto-sync’ to see my music, the app should be able to communicate with Google Music and see my music. The Amazon Cloud Player doesn’t make me do that so why does Google Music?  Google, you should have told me somewhere that I needed to do this instead of making me search around the help files to find the answer.  It would have saved me alot of frustration. Or like as not I just don’t get it, which is possible.

Long time to upload music

It takes a long time to upload music.  I have over 2,600 songs in my library and it took me over 6 hours to upload the songs using my enterprise-level, high speed network here at work.  It just crawled.  When I was at home on my DSL connection to see how long it would take to upload the entire collection, my home connection was going to take over 30 hours to upload.  Like as not I am spoiled with the speed of internet services that we now enjoy in the mainstream, however that just seems too slow to me.

I have loved Pandora for a long time, because it gives me access to music anywhere I go on my phone that I have with me 24/7.  However I can’t pick the songs I want to hear on Pandora.  At times I just want to listen to a song that I know I have in my collection.  Google Music allows me to do just that.  This is a fulfillment of the promises of cloud computing I think.  As long as Verizon doesn’t lock me down henceforth with metered data plans, I can happily live with this.  Google Music, and Amazon Cloud Music as then, are only going to get better and I greatly prefer them over any of the music management apps that are currently available to get music from your pc onto your phone.  I gave up on those type of apps because it just turned out to be a hassle, especially when switching phones.  Cloud music is where it’s at.  Do I recommend it to others?  Oh yes.  Will it replace my iPod/iTunes setup? Oh yes, at some point.

Now, Google needs to get busy updating that app, like now, and making software for my pc to manage my music.  Are you listening Google? Don’t keep this in Beta for 3 years like you do everything else.  You have a legion of people like me who are ready and willing to break up with Apple.