Google Play Music

[Dave]

Hands up who has a Gmail account!

You do, that's nice, you now have the chance to store up to 20,000 of your mp3 music files on Google Play Music for free!

I've just bee trying it out and it seems great! Once you've uploaded music you can access online from any computer and listen to it in a Spotify streaming style. You can also listen via your mobile device via an Android app (no iOS app yet).

I'm mainly using it as another backup for my music in case of disaster. You can redownload everything you have uploaded... although there might be a limit of 2 times! Which seems a bit tight, but then it should only be needed in emergencies!

The upload process is a bit odd as you have to download the Google Music Manager for PC (not sure about Mac) and do it via that. It asks to scan your vast collection and start uploading, but that might take days.... so I have been letting it scan one folder at a time at my own pace.
The good thing about it is that if it scans your music and recognises it as something that is for sale on the Google Music store, then it simply unlocks it online instead of having to physically upload your file... therefore saving LOTS of time.
If Google doesn't recognise your files, then it will upload your actual files.

Google does so much stuff for free now it's ridiculous!

[RydCook]

Whoa! This sounds fantastic! Definitely going to use this at some point. Google have won me over for email, documenta, filesharing... and now music.

[Dave]

It seems that once you have enough music uploaded that it offers you "Instant Mixes". Randomly chosen ones on your home page, or you can click the option for an "Instant Mix" via any individual track.

Instant Mix seems to select about 25 songs of a similar genre or style which you can then play on random for a personalised "Instant Mix". Works pretty nicely!

[Bill Edwards]

This does sound amazing.

I'll think we'll find out one day why Google does so much for free. End of days...

[woody88pp]

I got the google nexus 7 recently and its a handy bit of kit.

Will need to get on this google music manager, I have itunes match at the moment which looks like a total waste of money if I can do this for free!

[Dave]

Having a bad experience with buying my first album from the Google Play Music store at the moment (not with the music storage itself, that's still great).

So, I bought mad concept album The Polymorphic Code by The Algorithm which has 8 tracks.
First up, I only received 7 tracks! Track 7 was missing! Rubbish. I reported the problem.
Before I got a reply, the issue seemed to be resolved and all the tracks appeared in my Google Play library, so I downloaded the album as MP3s to put on my iPod.
All worked, but when I listened to the album, I found that track 4 was a duplicate of track 8 despite being named correctly!

So, at the moment I have an album with two track 8s and no track 4. Especially annoying as I have heard track 4 previewed pre-release and it's the best track on the album!

Off to send another error report!

[Bill Edwards]

Just started uploading my tunes. I just don't care anymore! The interweb can have me. It's like trying to run away from the rising sun.

I remember the days of Napster, waiting patiently for AGES for that 2.5Mb file to download. Now this. Mazin.

[Dave]

I've got all my music uploaded now.

Already taking advantage of it's convenience quite often already... mostly for the fun AutoMix feature. I just have it running in the background as I do something else on the PC.
I selected The Bigfoot song from Adam & Joe's Song Wars volume one as the source track for an auto mix and it did come up with similar jovial tracks to compliment it! Good show!

Still having trouble with the one album I purchased! Annoying. I'll stick to Amazon for my digital purchases from now on.