Music in the clouds: Two weeks on Google Music

Google Music's main artist page. 

When I'm not obsessing about music, I tend to obsess about technology. I'm a devoted user of Google apps and was excited to give Google Music a try when it was announced last month.

For anyone who doesn't know, Google Music is Google's entre into mp3 storage and playback, but it's all "in the cloud." In other words, it's entirely Web based. You upload your music to Google's servers and play it on anything that can browse the Web.

I got my official invite two weeks ago and uploaded my entire library, a trimmed-down 7,000 songs (just the necessities). The set up was quick and easy. The Mac OSX version adds a music manager application to the OSX system preferences. From there you point the music manager at the file in which you store your music, and it does the rest. Any time I add music to the folder, it's automatically uploaded to Google in the background. I don't even see it happening.

The initial upload lasted approximately 36 hours, but now my entire mp3 collection is on Google's server. So why would you need this?

The benefit is simple. Anything that has a browser can access my whole collection, a collection that is much too large to be really portable. I can stream anything I want on any computer. If I had an Android device, I'd be able to stream and cache songs for offline listening.  But the service also works on my iPad where I can stream music right through the iPad's mobile browser. The interface is a bit buggy -- for example you have to play, pause and then play to get an album started. But it works. It's not necessary, but it's a real convenience to able to stream my music to anything that can get online.

An album page in Google Music

But Google Music also has a few other benefits. I've used iTunes since it came out, but Apple's great little music player has become a bloated do-everything syncing service that just does too much. Google Music is simple to use. It has a great search bar to pull up artists and albums. It creates playlists as easily and automatically as iTunes does. In fact its instant mix might be better than Apple's. Also, managing important info and cover art for each album is easier than iTunes. It's a streamlined, easy and intuitive interface, something Google seems to do really well. And it's free.

In two weeks since my invite, I've been using the service nonstop. I prefer it to iTunes simply because I like the interface better. The only caveat for anyone considering using Google Music is that you can upload your music, but you cannot download (at least not yet -- this is beta software). So far it's worked without a hiccup. I can stream music in a browser with a dozen other tabs open, including gmail and Tweetdeck. I've read other reviewers say they wish Google had a service to buy music. I bought an album on Amazon a week ago and it not only downloaded to my music folder locally, but uploaded right away.

So far, Google Music is terrific. If you're tired of swapping song files from one device to another, Google Music is a great way to get around that. I have been on the fence between an iPhone and an Android phone (I like Apple hardware and Goolge software) and Music just might be the killer app that decides the whole thing for me in Android's favor.