2011/06/23

Testing Google's Music Beta

Last week I got the invitation to the new Google's "Music Beta" service. I haven't had time to test it too much, but these are my first impressions:

  1. Upload is really slow. That's of course due to my ADSL connection, but you can expect almost a week to upload all your music.
  2. It's strange that the limit is the number of songs (20.000) instead of the size of them
  3. The Uploader recognizes that .ogg files are music, but it refuses to upload them. Why? I've to verify if it has uploaded other "strange" formats that Foobar2000 played happily.
  4. I didn't had all the music properly tagged with ID3 as it was organized with folders and it worked fine, but now those files have crypting names. That's bad in a thousand files library. But the problem is that I have to find out which files have been uploaded wrong, then correct my local copies and also correct the remote copies (or reupload them).
  5. If I edit the metadata of some remote file, I can't download later that updated file. That means that we can't really get rid of our local copies and use just the cloud for storage. In no way I'm gonna get rid of my MP3 player until the phone's batteries last as much and the only way to put music there is with USB, no magic cloud connection.
  6. Some albums are missing the cover picture, and you can edit that with the web interface, but they have forgotten to add drag&drop support to easily upload the new picture. Hey Google, ask the GMail team to give you a hand.
  7. I don't see how playing streaming music in a browser can be interesting in my desktop, I won't use Google Music there until they provide a native application that can use my existing files without streaming them (Hey, I already have them here)
  8. The uploader has given me an interesting error with some files: "No music found in file", but every other player handles those files correctly. Editing the tags didn't fix, so I reencoded and then it accepted them and they were uploaded.
  9. Other times it has stated that there's an error while uploading, so I have to verify album by album if it has been correctly uploaded.