Google Music Beta

I received a Google Music Beta invite earlier in the week.  Of course I accepted it, and installed the helper on the machine where I keep my collection.

I was interested in seeing how well it would perform, given the size of my collection.  I have a large collection of music, about 18,000 tracks or so forth, all of it acquired legitimately.  I had a large CD collection already, which I went through methodically and ripped disc by disc, and then I have been buying mp3 albums at eMusic and Amazon since I stopped buying CDs.  The current limit for Google Music Beta is supposed to be 20,000 tracks.

The helper that I downloaded and installed began scouring my Music directory and uploading tracks about four days ago, and it just finished a few minutes ago.  I think it was about 150Gb or so of music. I was uploading from a machine at work that has a very high speed connection.  I suspect that at home, the upload would have taken much longer, since at home we have awful ATT DSL.

The upload seemed to go smoothly, and as far as I can tell, everything is there.  The web interface for Google Music Beta is nice, and the Android app also seems to be basic but functional.

A couple of things came to my attention as limitations.

First, Google Music Beta doesn't seem to make use of anything but the basic tags for artist, genre, album, track title and track number.  I have a large collection of classical music with additional details like composer, which is handy in Mediamonkey and other managers that recognize those tags.  I have also assigned star ratings to all my tracks, so that I can make up auto-playlists for favorite music by genre or artist.  I'd like to see some way of accessing all the other tagging information on the tracks.

Second, Google Music Beta doesn't seem to import any of the M3U playlists in the folders it scours.  This morning when I went running and wanted to try out Google Music Beta, I had to quickly throw together an Exercise playlist in the web interface since it didn't import my existing m3u playlist, which was exported from an auto-playlist in Mediamonkey.  I have several other playlists based on my favorite music that I would like to import to Google Music Beta but right now I don't see how to do that.  Oh well.  Fortunately, creating and managing playlists in Google Music Beta is very straightforward, basically drag and drop.  I thought Google Music Beta had the easiest playlist management of any of the web interfaces for music I have tried, including Audiogalaxy and Subsonic that stream from the computer, and Rhapsody and MOG which are cloud based.

As I said, I went running this morning with a hastily assembled Exercise playlist, and I was pleased with the results.  I have an HTC G2 on T-Mobile.  The stream was very robust, as robust as when I am streaming from Subsonic.  I had mixed experiences with many of the other streaming services.

There seem to be some odd glitches with the players.  In the web interface, it was easy to set a song, album, or playlist, or whatever to play, but I couldn't find a pause or stop control, so to stop the music I had to close the browser tab.  Maybe I'm missing something.  On the Android app, going through the playlist on shuffle, sometimes it repeated tracks until I hit the 'fast forward' to skip to the next track.

Overall this looks pretty solid and robust and well thought-out.  I may still continue with Subsonic since I invested so much time in figuring it out, and now that I have it figured out it works quite well, but of the cloud based services I have tried so far, Google Music Beta seems to be the most robust in terms of the stream, and has the cleanest interfaces.  As mentioned above it could use some additional features, but I assume they'll be adding things.

(9/11/2011 update)

I haven't been using Google Music Beta very much recently.  The main problem I was having was that on my HTC G2, the app became increasingly flaky.  For one thing, it didn't seem to play well with the original Music app that came with the phone, which I think was the default Android app.  Somehow it often became confused between the two of them.  In some cases it crashed the phone and brought down other apps, such as Cardiotrainer.  Also, the inability to import M3u playlists, or make use of any of the other Id3/id4 tags such as ratings that I had added to the music in my library was a downer.  I spent a lot of time rating my music to identify a subset of a few thousand tracks that I really, really liked, and there was no way to make use of that in Google Music Beta, at least no easy way via an m3u playlist.  There might have been some way of doing something in two steps, first by important the playlist into iTunes, but when I tried it, the results weren't pretty.

I assume Google will keep working with Music Beta and it will eventually have a winner, but right now I'm not seeing very much progress.  I would have thought that with something in Beta there would be frequent updates and so forth, but I don't remember the app being updated at all the whole time I used it.