Google Music beta

[Handruin]

Anyone want an invite? I have four available.

 

[Mercutio]

I have it. It's pretty lame. The uploader grabbed about 10% of my music collection and sort of randomly uploaded it. I cannot for the life of me figure out how it decided what to grab. Maybe because I have multiple symlinks pointing to the same directories on my file server?

Anyway, it's lame. Hopefully future development will make it less lame.

 

[Handruin]

I pointed it to my FLAC collection and it uploaded most of it so far. I'm guessing it must have recompressed it to MP3 before uploading? Their music service does what I expected it to do. It is basic, but it works fine. I can listen to my music at work without big issues or needing to carry anything around with me. I don't know what makes it lame in your opinion, it's just a basic web-based music player like most of the rest. If I were to compare it to Amazon's, I'd call Amazon's lame in comparison.

 

[timwhit]

This is what I use Subsonic for. I don't need to rely on any third parties, there are no space constraints, and I will never need to pay anyone.

 

[Handruin]

Looks like a nice tool. I'll give it a try later tonight.

 

[Mercutio]

I don't know what makes it lame in your opinion, it's just a basic web-based music player like most of the rest.

I don't care for the interface. It's very clunky, especially by relying on cover art or song title as principle forms of identification. I didn't like the space constraint nor the extreme randomness in what it actually uploaded. I could understand it uploading alphabetically until space filled up, but that's not what it did.

I organize my music using the filesystem rather than bothering with ID3 tags; they're not terribly useful for classical music. Google Music appears to be reliant on them, meaning that I have some albums listed by such weirdness as the soloist on one of the tracks.

I set it up as an experiment. I'm already capable of accessing my music collection remotely several other ways. But if I were planning on using a cloud service, I'd give a long, hard look at my available options because so far I haven't been impressed by anything.

It also occurs to me that I'm judging from the lens of a classical music fan. I make complaints about every new music-related service that purports to be for general audiences. Invariably, the services in question, whatever they might be, are not set up to handle the differing needs of classical music. Which just makes me question why anyone thought those services were ready for public use in the first place.

 

[Handruin]

I don't care for the interface. It's very clunky, especially by relying on cover art or song title as principle forms of identification. I didn't like the space constraint nor the extreme randomness in what it actually uploaded. I could understand it uploading alphabetically until space filled up, but that's not what it did.

Fair enough, it is a basic UI. I set my standards low for these kinds of tools. I find that is uses the normal items to organize songs, so none of that was upsetting to me. I prefer going in by artist and then listening from that point. I also found that it randomly uploaded the music, so that certainly needs some work. I also found some odd bugs with removing a folder location and adding a new one. It continued to upload from the old location and once it started the new one, I received a negative value count (for example: 203 out of -4503). There was also some oddness after I deleted all the music I had uploaded. It still thought the music was there in some of the menu items.

I organize my music using the filesystem rather than bothering with ID3 tags; they're not terribly useful for classical music. Google Music appears to be reliant on them, meaning that I have some albums listed by such weirdness as the soloist on one of the tracks.

I set it up as an experiment. I'm already capable of accessing my music collection remotely several other ways. But if I were planning on using a cloud service, I'd give a long, hard look at my available options because so far I haven't been impressed by anything.

It also occurs to me that I'm judging from the lens of a classical music fan. I make complaints about every new music-related service that purports to be for general audiences. Invariably, the services in question, whatever they might be, are not set up to handle the differing needs of classical music. Which just makes me question why anyone thought those services were ready for public use in the first place.

Why not try providing the feedback that you need to make the Google music service more useful for your classical needs? They make it easy to give the feedback. It's still not clear to me what would even help you as a classical music listener with any music service.

 

[Mercutio]

Why not try providing the feedback that you need to make the Google music service more useful for your classical needs? They make it easy to give the feedback. It's still not clear to me what would even help you as a classical music listener with any music service.

Classical music has a much wider need for searchable fields and methods of organization than other music. We need to know composer, conductor, performers - possibly broken down by multiple soloists, accompanists and/or ensemble, the production label, year of recording for cases where a single conductor conducted the same work with the same ensemble, and of course the name of the work.

As an example, Herbert von Karajan recorded Beethoven's nine symphonies four times each. I need to distinguish them by the year they were recorded and/or by the issuing label.

Getting back to the issue of distinguishing the music: Album art is bad. Lots of classical music is packaged with very minimal or completely nondescript art. Songs by title? Google says I uploaded 19943 tracks before I ran out of space. I can work by composer or album, but on my phone and on my desktop I'm rather annoyed by the inability to view a proper list rather than those giant graphical boxes.

And yes, I've left Google some feedback regarding these things. I haven't gotten and don't expect a response.

 

[sechs]

Supports FLAC but not vorbis. Am I missing something?

 

[Handruin]

Perhaps.

 

[sechs]

Vorbis is just too free....

 

[Handruin]

Google wants to pay for it...so sad.

 

[sechs]

Turns out it converts FLACs to 320bps MP3s for storage. I guess vorbis was, again, just too free.

 

[Stereodude]

I never was impressed by Vorbis. It was easily ABX'd in my tests many years ago.

 

[Handruin]

Turns out it converts FLACs to 320bps MP3s for storage. I guess vorbis was, again, just too free.

Interesting because I found that I ran out of space after 2,000 FLAC uploads. Google says they allow 20,000 files but wouldn't let me upload any more FLAC music because they said I had too many files. If they were converting them to 320bps MP3s, I would have expected more than 2000 were uploadable before I ran out of space.

 

[Mercutio]

Google Music's store component launched sometime in the last couple days. Google didn't manage to get to Warner's recording division signed on, so they're missing whatever musicians are signed to Warner labels.

The classical section has a bunch of New Age-y Mannheim Steamroller and faux-Irish folk music. Whole albums are $9.50.

I'm thinking I'd stick to Amazon, but to be honest my music purchases are still 95% discs. Discs I only use once, granted, but still discs.

 

[ddrueding]

All my music purchases are MP3s from Amazon. Probably 3-5 albums and a few singles a week.

 

[sechs]

Interesting because I found that I ran out of space after 2,000 FLAC uploads. Google says they allow 20,000 files but wouldn't let me upload any more FLAC music because they said I had too many files. If they were converting them to 320bps MP3s, I would have expected more than 2000 were uploadable before I ran out of space.

FYI, this is a known issue. Still not fixed in "not beta."

 

[Handruin]

FYI, this is a known issue. Still not fixed in "not beta."

Good to know, thanks.

 

[sechs]

It's annoying that they removed the known issues page.