Google Music is out of Beta!

[jefftheworld]

Anyone from the US (or who proxies through the US) who has Market access on their device might have noticed the updates to the music app and the addition of the music section on the market app.

Anyone use Google Music during the beta? Anyone trying it out now?

I've been using it since the beginning of the beta and I've been loving it. Being able to have access to my whole music collection wherever I am is great. I'm not sure how much I'll use the store, though. My musical tastes are eclectic at best. However, there seems to be a good amount of free music so I might try some stuff out.

Btw, for anyone who is trying out google music:

Check this out!

[GA Russell]

I looked briefly at Google Music, but I don't understand it. Is it like Spotify where you can listen to songs for free, or is it just a store to buy mp3's?

[jefftheworld]

It's both, really, and more. You can upload your own music collection and stream it to any computer or Android device. On top of that there's a music store and free tracks to listen to and/or download.

[RainingLemur]

I gave it a whirl. I think it looks nice. I wish the upload speeds were faster, though. But, that may just be my connection that is the cause. I haven't really done any reading to see if it's an actual problem, or it's a subset of PEBCAK (problem exists between chair and keyboard).

[jefftheworld]

No, I'll admit the upload speeds seemed a little slow, but it's meant to be a transparent process and it's not so bad after that initial sync operation. Now and again I'll add a song or an album to my shared folder and it syncs over in a reasonable amount of time.

Downloading purchased songs is much faster, though.

[Greg_E]

Since you've started using it, have the ads that google directs at you when you search changed in any way? Just wondering if they are using the information about what you listen to as a way to target the advertising. If not now I bet they will in the near future, their is no free lunch, storage and bandwidth cost money.

I basically solved the issue by using more advanced compression methods, more than 2200 songs in less than 5GB. Copied from the master on my laptop, to my Windows tablet, to a USB drive and onto my a500 tablet and my 43it "tablet". Since I also own all the disks it came from, I can adjust as needs change and if it all gets lost I can bring it back to life (lot of time). Until I can buy wave files, I will still buy disks and have the real media to help when technology changes, mp3 (any rate) and AAC (any rate) are not good as masters. I have about $300 worth of disks that I need to buy right now, some are remastered that are in sets of less than $10 each disk and I doubt I could save money at $.99 per song because I would be buying most songs on each disk, average 10 songs per disk. So the buying music online just doesn't make sense to me for most of the music I listen too. If the style I wanted had only one or two songs per disk, I would certainly be tempted with a per song purchase scheme (would still be better as no DRM wave).

And yes I do have the Google Music service and player on my a500 tablet, I don't like the way it displays by artist, any of the soundtracks disks I have show up on top of the stack which makes it hard to see the disks I play more often. Winamp does the same thing so I am more likely to use the Acer music application or the Archos music app on my two Android tablets.

Not trying to shoot you posts down, it's just that Google Music does not work the way I want things to work. For some people this will be great, for others like me it just doesn't fit.