The Google Music Review: By CS5 Design.

Well here at CS5 Design we like to try out the latest products and software for our readers; so 2 weeks ago I was invited to try out Google Music. I guess being a top designer and Blogger does have some benefits after all. So  our first look review of Google Music. I’ve spent the last week playing about and using the beta of Google Music and for someone like me, with multiple PCs, a Mac, a Motorola Xoom and A Samsung Galaxy S2 it’s like the Holy Grail of music players. Gone are the days of trying to copy and sync music from my mainPC to everywhere else. Now, no matter where I am, as long as I’ve got internet access, I’ve got access to my entire music collection.

(Google Music is in beta and currently available only in the US… Unless like me you are a top blogger and designer)

Google Music is a new way to listen to your music. By uploading music to the cloud, you can then access your music anywhere you have an internet connection, without having to download it onto your computer or phone. All your music is streamed right from Google’s storage system, so you won’t miss a beat.

Google unveiled Google Music at the Google I/O conference that happened this May. The service is in beta testing now, and you can sign up to help test it out at the Google Music home page. Remember that while this is a very neat piece of technology, it’s still in beta. This isn’t a finished product yet, so expect bugs. Nonetheless, it’s fun to take a look at what Google has cooking! The entire process of getting your tunes up on Google Music is pretty easy, and so is creating playlists and listening to the music.

Google Music is simple to install, simple to use and eliminates the hassles inherent in trying to manage a large music collection across multiple devices. At least that’s what they would like you to believe…

Google Music: Getting started

The idea behind Google Music is simple – upload your music collection to a Google server and then access that music collection from the cloud using a PC, Mac or Android device.  iPhone and Apple iPad users look to be out of luck, at least for now, because Google hasn’t developed an iOS app for Google Music, and the Web-based version requires Flash, which Apple iOS doesn’t support. Which is ashame as it could be another great market for google to step into, however it would mean competing with Apples own I-Cloud, which was recently announced at their conference back in May 2011.

You upload your collection via a Music Manager application that you download and install for either a Windows PC or a Mac. Google has made the upload process exceedingly simple. After installation, Google Music asks whether you use iTunes or Windows Media Player for your music collection, and then automatically grabs and uploads all your music. If you prefer, you can tell it to grab music from only your music folder or from multiple other folders instead.

The program itself doesn’t consume many system resources, and you probably won’t even notice it running, although when it uploads a song you might notice your internet speed drop. If you have a fast internet connection, you won’t need to worry too much about this — you’ll barely notice your internet speed dip.

Even though the uploading process was easy, there are some problems. When I first installed the Google Music Manager and pointed it to a folder containing Mile Davis’ Kind of Blue album, it took over 5 minute to scan the folder, and then another 5 to upload it to Google Music. That’s 10 minutes for a total of 6 songs — way too long. By comparison, iTunes took about 5 seconds to scan the folder and add it to my iTunes library.

Another downside to the music uploading process is that there’s no way to upload music right from your web browser; you have to run the Google Music Manager on your computer. As someone who likes to have as few programs running on his computer as possible (even though the Google Music Manager is really small), this bugs me. It’s also a bit counterintuitive; you’d expect a web-based music manager to have a way to upload songs via the browser, but alas, not in Google Music.

Your music uploads in the background; you can start listening immediately, even while the files upload. How long the upload takes will vary according to the size of your collection and your bandwidth. In my case this was a huge

problem, my bandwidth isn’t bad; I am on one of the top levels in Britain in terms of uploading speed, however I have over

20’000 songs; which also comes to be a problem as I shall explain later. The uploading so far has taken over 10 days; and I’m still only about 14’000 songs in. What if your connection breaks? Or you have to take your computer away? Well this has been good and bad for me, at times I’ve restarted the connection to Google music; and its picked where I have left of. At other times I have had to delete where Google is looking for files; and restart the application, and eventually it will start uploading again. However when I think about it, it would be very difficult to Google to make this process much quicker, unless it had a library of songs already stored in its service; and then when Google looks through your files; it could just link those already stored on its servers already to your area so to speak. The artists and tracks that aren’t found on Google servers could then be uploaded, in which case those would then also be available to any other user. Still it’s a small gripe for something that at present hasn’t cost me a penny.

Google Music handles MP3, AAC, WMA and FLAC formats, and lets you store up to 20,000 files. How much storage space that translates to will vary according to the average file size of your music. If your average file size per song is 3MB, for example, that would mean about 60GB of space. Again for me this was a slight problem; I have around about 25’000 tracks; however I doubt many people are as music mad as me. And if I have to filter through 5000 tracks I hardly listen to, the service is well worth it.

This is significantly better than Amazon’s recently released Amazon Cloud Player — Amazon’s player doesn’t handle WMA and limits your total storage space to 5GB, regardless of the number of files. However, Amazon stores any kind of file, not just music — and if you buy an MP3 album from Amazon, that limit goes up to 20GB. In addition, MP3 purchases from Amazon don’t count against that limit. Apple users are out of luck here as well, because Google Music doesn’t support M4P (Apple DRM) or M4A (Apple Lossless) files. Again perhaps something that may become available in the future release of Google Music, as such this is still in the early stages.

Organizing and playing your collection
Google Music organizes your music in a few default ways. You can view your collection by album title, artist name, song title, and genre. You can also make playlists yourself (by creating a new playlist, and then dragging music from an album onto the playlist’s name on the left side of the window), or let Google Music create Instant Mixes for you, which is a combination of your songs that Google thinks are a good mix with the song you’ve indicated. For instance, if I pick So What? from Kind of Blue, an Instant Mix playlist might have Dave Brubeck’s Take Five as the next song.

The service also creates automatic playlists for songs that you’ve given a “Thumbs up” to indicate that you like, songs that were recently added, and free songs that came with signing up for the service.

When you double-click on a song or playlist, the music starts playing via a built-in player at the bottom of the screen. It works well enough — it has the basic player controls you’ve come to expect on everything from DVD players to iPods —and you can adjust the volume and turn on song shuffling right from the player. There is no quick mute button, however.

Overall, the playlist and general organizing features are not yet up to par with those of iTunes and other music players. At times, the user interface seems to have hidden away things you’d expect — like an easy way to see what playlist you’re listening to and what’s coming up next, or a way to sort your albums. Future versions of Google Music will need to make a lot of improvements in this area.

Google Music: Music on your Android device

To listen to your music on your Android device, you’ll need to head to the Android Market and download an update to the built-in music player. When you first run the updated player, you’ll have to link it to your Google account. This also was a problem for me being in the United Kingdom, due to this of course being for the U.S. only so far; I had to find somebody from the U.S. who could acquire this file for me to install on my Samsung Galaxy S2 and Motorola Xoom.

The player looks and works like the normal Android music app – that is to say, functional with little sense of style. (While, as might be expected, the Music app looks different on a phone compared to a tablet, they are basically the same.)  What I did like about the application however was that it is fast to load; in fact it’s instant. When scrolling through the music; and let me tell you first I am well used to using Itunes, Windows Media Player, Win amp amongst other music players with my 25’000 tunes; this one loaded up flawlessly. No stutter when scrolling through the music either; it just handles it like a breeze. To buffer the music on a device; it will depend on your internet connection, and whether you are using 3g, 4g or WI-FI, it takes about a second on my 20mbps connection to give you some sort of indication. You can also cache songs, which is a great feature of course for on the go music, when your mobile phone network provider limits you to 500mb; it would mean you could use that up easily in under an hour; in which case caching playlists is the way forward.

Cloud-based music shows up alongside music you’ve stored on the device, with no clear visual indication whether the music is on the device itself or available via the cloud. This is slightly disconcerting; it would be nice to be able to see at a glance what’s local and what’s not, because if you’re in a location with a flaky connection, you may have some issues with streaming music. In addition, wireless providers may charge for bandwidth in the future, so you’d like to know whether you’ll be streaming music or not.

At first, I ran into an odd anomaly. I had previously copied part of my music collection from my PC to my Motorola Xoom, and I noticed that those files I had copied were showing up twice — once because they were on the device, and once because they were now also available via the cloud. But that turned out to be true only during the upload process — after all files were uploaded, duplicate entries were automatically (and thankfully) eliminated.

That wasn’t the only foible I found. I installed Google Music on both my Droid X and my Motorola Xoom, and noticed that with the Droid X, if I tapped options for an album or song that was stored in the cloud, I could choose to make it available offline — in other words, the song would download to the device itself and I could then play it even when I wasn’t connected to the internet. But when I tapped the same album or song on the Xoom, most of the time I didn’t have the same option to make it available offline.

It took me a while to solve the conundrum. The problem was that the Google Music player for Android doesn’t directly handle WMA files. While the music player built into the Xoom is the standard Android player, the player in the Droid X was tweaked by Motorola to give it the capability of playing WMA files. So even though Google Music can stream WMA files, and the Music player can play that stream, the normal Music app can’t play WMA files when they’re locally stored. So the Droid X can play them; the Xoom can’t.

Google would do well to fix this by giving the normal Android Music app the ability to play local WMA files, because otherwise it’s quite confusing. But despite these small tangible issues; its bugs that can and will be ironed out when taken out of Beta. It is Google after all…

All in all, despite these issues, I found that playing music on my Android devices was simple and straightforward. Basically, you manage and play cloud-based music in the same way you do local music – you can even include both in the same playlist. One nice touch is that you can choose to display only music that is offline (that is, stored on your local device), or your entire collection, including cloud-based music as well as local music.

There’s also a nice addition to the Music player called Instant Mix. It’s a Pandora-like feature that examines the song you’re currently playing, then looks through your music collection and creates a playlist composed of music similar to the music you’re playing. I’ve tried it and it worked as advertised. You can also rate your songs with thumbs up or thumbs down, and then use those ratings to later help decide what music to play.

At this point in the beta, you can’t buy music and include it directly in your collection. Tap a song and choose “Shop for artist” from the menu, and you get sent to a Web page that lets you buy the music from multiple sources. However, the music won’t download directly into Google Music. In other words, you have to download a song to your device and then upload it to the cloud to be able to listen to it via Google Music.

If you want to listen to your music on a Windows PC or Mac (or a smartphone that supports Flash), you can head to the Web-based music player at music.google.com . The interface is clear and straightforward. As with the Android app, you can view your collection by albums, artists, genres, and songs; create playlists and instant mixes; and give songs thumbs-up or thumbs-down.

I’ve tried the Web-based player on both a Windows PC and a Mac, and Google Music works and looks the same on both and worked without a hitch.

A bright future ahead
Google Music has a lot of potential. The building blocks are there for it to become an amazing tool that will let you digitally access your music from anywhere with an internet connection. As fast internet connections become less expensive and easier to access, Google Music will be able to do amazing things. At times it’s hard to believe that Google Music is still in beta, and as such many may have a few irks or run into a few problems; that isn’t normally expected from a Google Product. What it also means, is that improvements are coming, and we’ve not seen the final product yet. Google has a proven track record of delivering some amazing technology, and Google Music could be its next big thing. Only time will tell. Of course there is also the competition to think about… One thing is for sure, cloud services are the next big thing, and whether you like them or not, they are here to stay.

The alternatives:

1. Amazon Cloud player