

Google Music: The Best Service That Nobody’s Using - bigmetalman
http://www.thepowerbase.com/2012/02/google-music-the-best-service-that-nobodys-using/2/

======
johnnyg
I installed Google Music to my MacBook Pro a few months ago. It kept prompting
me with the install screen, long after I'd dragged it into my apps folder.

I didn't use it and uninstalled it by dragging the app icon into the trash.
Didn't work.

I tried the AppDelete path. No go.

I googled around and found I was not the only one. Uninstall is broken and you
are basically stuck with a prompt twice a day to install the Google Music app
until you reinstall your OS or go slogging through the guts of your box,
throwing switches you don't understand by mixing internal uninstall tutorials
(ok, to be fair, this is how you do just about everything...).

In conclusion, that app is a daily annoyance and I'd caution people against
installing it.

~~~
psychotik
You should try <http://www.audiogalaxy.com>. I think you'll like it. Don't
take my word for it though - I've built it. Look up user reviews on
iTunes/Android.

~~~
onli
Do you use html5 for playing the music, or do you need flash? That's kind of
my only big negative for google music, apart from the upload instead of
indexing, it relies on flash for playing the music even though it is a
html5-site.

~~~
psychotik
HTML5 when available, Flash otherwise. It depends on the source audio format,
and the browser you're using.
<http://www.schillmania.com/projects/soundmanager2/> drives our playback on
the website for most cases.

------
chrischen
> no known digital music distributor has gone through the trouble of weaving
> personally identifying information into each track they sell, and if they
> did, it would be a much bigger deal than a few bootlegs getting uploaded
> into Google Music.

Err... Actually iTunes weaves your ID into files you buy and nobody seemed to
notice evidently (so it wasn't a big deal).

~~~
psychotik
Amazon does too. It's a music industry thing. See
<http://uits.umusic.com/faq.htm>

~~~
RexRollman
Amazon doesn't do that to all tracks, and they tell you when they do.

------
Arelius
I'd like to mention that iTunes Match is a similar service for Apple
customers, the integration with Apple products has been better than Google's
integration with droid IMO.

It's not free, but at just over $2 a month, it seems to give Apple a lot more
flexibility with bargaining with the publishers, which makes me feel a bit
more secure about the future of the service and my personal music collection.

Also, it's surprisingly nice to have it match against songs that are already
uploaded to their service, It took over a month to get my entire library into
the Google Music cloud, yet all my music was available in iTunes match within
the hour.

~~~
oflannabhra
The fact that iTunes Match does not stream content puts it in a separate class
of service than Google Music and Amazon Cloud Player, in my opinion.

~~~
culturestate
Apple says at <http://www.apple.com/itunes/itunes-match/> that iTM is a
streaming service, though I've not used it so can't personally confirm.

"Does iTunes Match stream or download songs? On a computer, any songs stored
in iCloud will stream over the air when played, though you can download them
at any time by clicking the iCloud download button. iOS devices will start
playing tracks from iCloud as they download and will store them so that you
can listen to them later even if you don’t have a network connection. Apple TV
only streams songs."

~~~
Arelius
Yes, the only real difference is that, given sufficient local storage, the
song will also get copied to your local device. This seems like an advantage
IMO.

------
ajross
I want to like it, but it's not doing what I want. I have a ton of music on my
Android phone, but app won't sync from a phone, only from a desktop computer.
The corroloary to this is that music I get from outside the Android market
(e.g. friends, random downloads, Amazon MP3) is invisible to the cloud unless
I copy it manually.

And the Linux app sucks rocks. My memory is that it's an enormous pain to get
installed on F16/x86-64. It doesn't understand the standard proxy environment
variables or gconf settings, and in fact when used behind a proxy, THE UI
LOCKS UP SOLID a few seconds after starting. So I can't use it at work.
(Because who wants to listen to music at work?)

I wouldn't even care, except that I _have_ to use the desktop app. Even things
that I'd think would work as web apps aren't there. You can't upload from a
web app. You can't manage play lists from a web app.

That said, the Android player app is actually not bad at all, and I do use it.
But the cloud side of the equation is a total fail from my perspective.

~~~
lepht
Same experience here, and the situation on the iPhone is even worse: there's
not even a native first-party app.

------
ackmm7
I've played with Google Music for quite some time and while its a really great
service I have one major gripe... Data Usage!

For some reason Google Music will use almost 2.5x the amount of data that
Pandora or Spotify use on my phone. (Keep in mind this is with Background data
and High quality streaming turned OFF!)

In this mobile data cap / throttle world that we live in I can't afford to
have my music app use more than 2gb of a data a month!

------
valgaze
I would pay $$ for Google Music.

I have loaded up a bunch of old radio shows & lectures for which I would not
have the space on my phone but w/ Google Music I'm all set.

If the team can figure out easy streaming podcasts (like Android Double Twist
but without so much spammy/crap content) they will have themselves a nice
little business

------
RobertKohr
He talks about some issues of if you have pirated music, google wouldn't
likely be able to target you, but that is nonsense. A ripped copy of a song
put up online can be as unique as a fingerprint (and if put up by a record
company, could have a fingerprint). This could be detected by google, and they
could report you.

But, it isn't illegal to own pirated music. It is just illegal to distribute
them. So perhaps this isn't a problem?

~~~
pyre

      > A ripped copy of a song put up online can be
      > as unique as a fingerprint
    

If they are just MD5'ing the file, then changes to the metadata could cause
this fingerprint to change.

    
    
      > But, it isn't illegal to own pirated music. It is
      > just illegal to distribute them. So perhaps this
      > isn't a problem?
    

Record companies (IIRC) have successfully argued that streaming your own music
to yourself is a 'broadcast/performance' to a single person. There are many
ways that they could attempt to go after this.

~~~
Arelius
It's trivial to just skip the header and metadata sectors, and just MD5/SHA
the actual bitstream. With a bit more compute resources you can do the same
for the decompressed audio stream, but that'd likely prove less advantageous.

~~~
RexRollman
That's interesting, as I use Exact Audio Copy with Accurate Rip, which
actually compares my rips to other user's rips to ensure it was done properly.
This means that I have FLAC files that would compare to other user's; sans the
differences in Metadata.

~~~
pyre
Well, when the BSA^wRIAA auditors come to your door, you'll just have to show
them your CD collection! If you don't have any pirated material, then you have
nothing to hide!

~~~
RexRollman
I actually no longer keep CDs. Since no one sells lossless music, aside from
mostly indie artists, I purchase used CDs, which I then rip and throw away
(Amazon is a great source for used CDs, by the way).

I like having lots of music, and paying for it, but I am not a fan of owning a
physical CDs.

------
51Cards
Bring it to Canada and I'll add one more to the user count gladly. (yes, I
know I can jump through hoops to do it now in a limited fashion)

~~~
rodion_89
Pro tip for fellow Canadian residents:

1\. Login to Google Music once from an American IP address.

2\. Use it forever from any IP address.

------
msg
Also on a Mac. I had noticed the DMG for the Google Music Manager opening
repeatedly, but I chalked it up to a Finder window being open during a
shutdown or reboot. Interesting that you can't stop it.

My workflow is the following:

1\. Wait for Amazon MP3 special for album I want

2\. Buy album

3\. Download to Mac with MP3 downloader

4\. Sync Google Music with iTunes library.

5\. Stream Google Music to phone and browser at work.

This way I have a physical master to use how I see fit. Prices are usually
better on Amazon than iTunes store, $4 per album unless I'm buying from a
personal favorite on release day. Selection is basically universal.

I've been liking this scrobbler/lyrics looker-upper for the web client:

[http://www.danielslaughter.com/projects/google-music-with-
la...](http://www.danielslaughter.com/projects/google-music-with-lastfm/)

------
lucb1e
@Title: Wonder why that is...

 _We're sorry. Google Music is currently only available in the United States._

------
potater
My overall experience with Google Music has been kinda meh. I like their
sharing functionality, but my first purchase was a pain in the butt….

I finally decided to buy a few albums during the big music sale G Music
promoted during the holiday season. Unfortunately every time I'd check out it
would prompt me to log in again. During this I noticed that at least some
element of the process was using a different subdomain than the album page I
was checking out from. Not sure if the login cookie just wasn't persisting
across differing subdomains domains or my browser was set to block cookies set
by third parties, but I vaguely remember having to manually whitelist the
domain in Chrome's cookie exception manager to complete my purchase. It took a
moment to figure out because there was no particular useful error - just the
prompt to log in again.

I have no idea if I previously changed a setting in Chrome that resulted in
this annoyance or if it was a default setting in Chrome, but that nearly
prevented me from buying from Google's music service. There's no way someone
like my Mom or sister would've figured that out. I hope they resolved that
component assuming the problem wasn't limited to just my set up because at the
time I thought it was rather silly that I wasn't able to easily purchase from
a Google browser without modifying settings.

~~~
thewordis
It's caused by the checkbox to deny third-party cookies, and it's on their
known issues page.

[http://support.google.com/androidmarket/bin/static.py?hl=en&...](http://support.google.com/androidmarket/bin/static.py?hl=en&page=known_issues.cs&ki_topic=1335215)

~~~
potater
Ahh, thanks for the heads up, thewordis. It's nice to know that they're aware
of the problem.

------
ek
One of the issues with Google Music, and this is something that I have seen
increasingly over the past year or so, is that it seems that I can often roll
my own, better solution to problems that these services claim to solve. In
this specific case, running MPD into an Icecast stream means that I have
remote access to my music library from anywhere, and using flacsync to make
lossy copies of my FLAC files means that it's easy for me to manually manage
the library on my MP3 player. All this without the pain of having to deal with
the issues that this article talks about.

Obviously this setup is rather technical, and requires a nontrivial bit of
setup work, but the fact that it is often easy to have ideas for substantial
life improvements and then implement them well, with free software, has left
me a bit disenchanted with the offerings from large, generally innovative
companies like Google and Apple (a similar hack for streaming music to an
AirPort Express from MPD can be had with the raop-play module for PulseAudio,
for example).

------
odiroot
Well this headline is really unfair.

I love Google Music, though not in a browser. It's a really great service once
you run it in Nuvola Player (multimedia keys support, switching to Grooveshark
and other services).

Too bad you have to "cheat" to register from Europe.

~~~
rplnt
When they opened (hune/july last year) and it was invite-only (but everyone
got like five of them right after registration) it worked fine. It was
probably a mistake on their side but they didn't revoke the accounts.

------
snampall
I use it and it's the most used app of my smart phone.

------
snampall
I love google music and I use it everyday. It's the most used app of my smart
phone.

I wish they had a download option for all the music not just the music that I
bought on google. That would help me to get rid of all the music on my
computer.

~~~
olegious
They do. Just shift select all the songs that you want to download, click that
little menu button and select "download all songs"

------
jsz0
It's just too buggy for me. I've had issues with the music manager not
uploading new music, the Android app screwing up album sorting/track numbers,
to long (5 minute+) delays in starting the streaming, tons of problems with
artwork, etc. Nice idea but it just didn't seem to actually work very well for
me. I've had much better results with Subsonic. It's not the same type of
service as Google Music (you host the server on your own computer /
connection) but it offers a lot of advantages. Pretty easy to install too. As
long as you have a machine available 24x7 and a halfway decent Internet
connection it works fantastically well.

------
moeffju
I can't tell if this article is serious or satire. Of course Google could hash
your tracks locally before "reencoding" them (do they really re-encode tracks?
I thought they only transcoded FLAC to MP3, but didn't touch MP3s). Of course,
iTunes and Amazon tag/watermark your purchased tracks, even if there's no DRM.
Lastly, of course people use Google Music. In fact, I use it so much and it's
so well integrated into Android that I didn't even realize I didn't transfer
any files to my new phone until I travelled to Brazil and was without data
connection for half a day.

------
sheckel
If you signed up early enough and bought an album (or something like that),
Amazon gave out free unlimited storage for music. With that, there's no good
reason to move to Google (20k song limit) - they have a perfectly good Android
app, a decent web player, and they make it a snap to upload/download from your
computer. I've tried Google music out and I agree - the software is really
annoying.

It doesn't help that I already spent a month uploading my music to Amazon. I'm
not going through that again anytime soon.

~~~
moeffju
I signed up very early, but Amazon wouldn't let me buy an album from
Amazon.com and wouldn't count albums from Amazon.de. Internet without borders,
please..?

------
eli
_The fact of the matter is, there is absolutely no way Google could determine
if your tracks were illegally downloaded or simply ripped from your own
physical discs._

Well that's simply false. If I ripped a CD myself, it wouldn't be byte-for-
byte identical as the copy on Pirate Bay. In fact, if I rip it myself and
don't share that rip with anyone it should probably be unique within the
system.

And how hard would it be to figure out who has illegal copies of an unreleased
album?

~~~
brokenthorn
Encoding software for most lossy formats rely on some form of prediction and
realtime analysis. That can't be the same for every repeated encode. Some
randomness has to appear so that bit for bit, separate encodes are not alike.

~~~
jerf
Why speculate when you can test?

    
    
       $ ls -l KDE_Startup_new.wav
       -rw-r--r-- 1 jerf jerf 970882 Feb 27 21:42 KDE_Startup_new.wav
       $ lame KDE_Startup_new.wav 1.mp3
       $ lame KDE_Startup_new.wav 2.mp3
       $ md5sum *mp3
       0bc5fee9b5d67ca2d6f1bf61a186067a  1.mp3
       0bc5fee9b5d67ca2d6f1bf61a186067a  2.mp3

~~~
tcas
Interesting. I know in x264 there's a non-deterministic option when using
multithreading that can speed up encoding and quality sometimes, otherwise it
always produces the same output.

------
thewordis
It works pretty well for me.

My feature wishlist:

    
    
      * iOS native app
      * nested playlists  
      * smart playlists 
      * playlist pictures 
      * playlist export 
      * gapless playback 
      * built-in scrobbling to last.fm 
      * volume control in android store 
      * music manager instant recognition

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thomasknowles
If I had it in the UK and they didn't convert flac and I would gladly pay.
However, the don't and do.

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autarch
Another link to page 2 of an article.

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baconhigh
No. Because it's not available in my fucking country yet.

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drivebyacct2
Why? I have a Subsonic server. It supports more formats, transcoding,
(effectively) infinite storage. Open API for making mobile apps, etc.

(heh, my reply made more sense with the original title)

