Google Music Beta

[iceman]

Got an invite and signed up for the Google Music Beta...seems pretty cool although Apple's icloud announcement certainly makes that seem like it will be a better service when it is fully rolled out in December. The seamless synching is gonna be sweet if it works right.

It's kinda beat that it rejects anything with DRM, I don't know enough to try to effect a work-around by stripping the DRM info. Fortunately most of my music doesn't have DRM embedded.

Main issue right now is how slow this bitch is. I began uploading music yesterday at four o'clock, here it is 21 hours later and it's only uploaded 1150 songs out of 10,000+. Granted it's a DSL connection but geez, at this rate it's going to take a week! Hopefully they'll figure out a way to speed it up as they go along.

Just a report from the field...

[Danno]

It seems cool, only problem I've seen is the same slow upload, but that makes sense. They just rolled it out and everyone is trying to upload their 50gig library.

[Nomad79]

upload speeds are usually restricted by your internet connection not the cloud service (regardless of whether it is google, amazon, apple). most internet connections are asymmetrical, meaning that download speeds are a lot faster than the upload speed. you can check your speeds at http://www.speedtest.net/.

[sidewall]

Just requested invite. Google usually makes cool stuff.

[iceman]

Is there a correlation (fuck, there's that word again!) between upload speed and the speed of wireless file transfers between computers on the same network or are they totally different?

[brice618]

Different. Essentially its one computer downloading a file from another when connected to a wireless network. You can download as fast as the wireless router can spit out the information. You don't even need an internet connection for that actually.

[RShea]

Is there a correlation (fuck, there's that word again!) between upload speed and the speed of wireless file transfers between computers on the same network or are they totally different?

Different, usually your internet upload speed is the slowest of all the transfers- download speeds are faster than upload speeds on most DSL and Cable connections, then wireless local transfers, then wired local transfers are the fastest. Google may have some server issues too with the new service rolling out- but they typically will monitor that and add capacity as they gear up a limited roll-out. They will many times suspend or not grant invites while that is happening.

[Lev]

Been using music beta for the last week. Love it. Its so nice to just open a web page and have my entire music collection right there. The android app is sick too. Way nicer than the stock music player

[crackboy]

yea the webapp is pretty nice. haven't tried it out on my phone, but its slick and really good quality, though i think my other computer will be uploading forever, its pretty slow, though it isn't al that accurate, i seem to have way more files then it seems to think i uploaded

[G]

The cloud:

[bryanthebold]

I've had it for about a week now. My DSL sucks a nut so I still only have part of my collection uploaded but for what I have its great. Android app is a tad buggy but gets better every update. Its easy to see what songs are on your phone and which are on the cloud so if your planning on being out of service you can download the songs you want or play popular ones from your cache. It even uploads FLAC but will convert them to 320 kbps for streaming. Web app is nice too when your on public computers and you want to listen (aka hijacking tunes at the party).

[MakersTeleMark]

Why wouldn't Google validate the non-drm song you are uploading by its tags, then check it's own servers to see if it has already been uploaded, and if so, credit you for the upload and move on to new music? Seems a lot less taxing of bandwidth, and server space.

[iceman]

It's got something to do with the rights. Google doesn't have agreements with the labels (and I don't think they have anything with the artists either, not positive on that), so apparently their lawyers are saying they can store music that's uploaded to them but not provide it in any way, which they would be doing if they just saw what song it was and either added it to your account or provided a linked index, which is the way Apple is going in order to minimize storage requirements.

It looks to me like Apple's going to win this one, I've been a staunch android supporter but I have an upgrade available and I may get an iphone 5 when they come out. The seamless synching business is gonna be really good. Obviously Google and Amazon will fight back with systems of their own, so I'm not giving up the ship just yet.