Most likely you already heard about a new music service offered by Google called Music Beta by Google. it is still in beta testing, and by invitation only. if you haven’t applied to get an invitation yet then don’t bother, most likely you will never get an invitation. I applied a day after the service came out, and I haven’t heard anything back from them yet. its been more than 3 weeks now.
But even though I have not tested the service myself, I’ve been reading a lot about the service, and I find it pretty cool, though not impressive. according to some news sources Google was not able to land any agreement with mayor record companies, so there is no option to buy music through the service like Amazon and iTunes does. with Google Music, you need to upload all your tunes to their online space, and then you can play the files through the web browser or through 2.2 or later Android powered mobile devices.
let’s list some Google Music Service drawbacks.
- Google has no agreement with record label companies so you cannot buy new music and keep the files online like Amazon does.
- Most likely the record label companies will be pissed off at Google for letting people upload music to their servers, without verifying the music was purchased legally. Record companies most likely will try to force Google to do a sort of legitimacy check up before uploading files to Google Music service.
- Google Music Beta is only compatible with android devices using firmware 2.2 or newer. no app available for iPhones, or Window Phone 7 yet.
Google Music without offering the option to buy new songs through their service is basically reduced to simply online storage with the option to stream the music to any browser enabled device or mobile phones using the android OS. also many people might be reluctant to upload their music to Google service, in fear of Record label companies spying on their content and getting in trouble because of pirated stuff. also not being able to stream the music to an iPhone or a Windows 7 Phone phone is a bummer. personally, I love Android, but people want choices, so support for many mobile platforms is a must.
So why bother with Google Music service? you don’t have to. there is a better app for that!
Since awhile back people ( me including ) have been looking for ways to store their music files online, for backup and accessibility reasons. a lot of people started using Amazon simple storage for these reasons, the only problem is that you cannot stream the files directly from amazon S3. Now with mobile internet speed getting faster the urge to be able to stream music to mobile phones also got bigger. why keep synching music from computers to limited phone memory storage cards, when you can have all the music online and stream it to a mobile device directly without synching anything?
well, apparently a guy named Sindre Mehus thought about this around 2004 and built an open source app for it. his app is called Subsonic, and it does and has done a lot more than what the Google Music service offers. here are some of the advantages:
- 100% open source
- support for hundreds of GBs of music
- support for Android ( all versions ) iPhone and Windows 7 phones.
- support for MP3, OGG, AAC, and many other stream-able file formats
- re-sampling to lower bitrate if bandwidth is limited.
- many desktop clients to play music on computer directly from the server.
- use my own box, so I don’t worry getting caught by record label companies for music downloaded by P2P clients.
- offline song caching for uninterrupted music playing in areas without mobile Internet connection.
Subsonic is not a hosted service, you need to have your own box in order to use it. that can either be your desktop at home, or a dedicated or VPS rented server. I have been using subsonic for 2 months, and it works great. I have a Ubuntu 10.10 server running on 6 GB memory and 1 TB of storage in a 25/25 Mbits Fiber optic connection. my wife and I and a few friends play music off the server on their phones, and we never have had a problem.. not a single glitch.
if you don’t want to give your music to Google, and want to be able to stream your music to your mobile device or be able to play your music library from any computer, I recommend you look into Subsonic. is a great open source app, way ahead of the game many big players are now calling innovation. I’m sorry but they are 8 years behind.
Yeah Google music is not gonna last.They already have issues like you mentioned and on top of it Subsonic is way ahead of them and its free and open for anyone to use.
Also, now apple came up with iCloud where it automatically syncs up all of your devices wirelessly and if you buy a song on your iphone, then your itunes on your computer is updated and you can play the song on there and it will sync to your iPad also.
As great as Google , they are always playing catch up and the only good thing they have brought to the world is their search engine.
Remember it is still in beta, so you can’t completely trash it. I agree they need some record companies to back them, but I imagine they’ll get one eventually regardless of the piracy issue.