Google Music Beta

vansmack wrote:

sweetcell wrote:
then again, google is supposedly floating in storage capacity so they probably don't care…

Though I don't know for sure (and nobody will tell me, trust me, I've asked), I'm going with this.

I think Google allotted each user 80GB's of storage space and is running individual databases of each collection.  When I request playback of a live bootleg or alternate mix of a song that I downloaded from some local DJ that maybe 100 people might have, I get EXACTLY that song played back to me.  That has to be my individual copy of a song.   

You may very well be right about that. The best that I have to compare this to is how Live365 uses it space. Regardless of how many different stations may play the same exact song, it is based solely on any specific file uploaded by the particular station owner who also has a specific allotment to work with. What is shared are the album covers; however, if you know what you are doing, there is a way to manually by-pass those and use what you prefer.

So this weekend I was streaming a bunch of albums while driving around wine country and on above ground public transportation. I lost the signal a couple of times in the sticks of wine country, but all in all pretty good.

This morning, I listened to one of those albums again above ground and then continued down below ground on the train where I had no signal.  Didn't skip a beat. If I hadn't listened to the album earlier that week, I'm sure it wouldn't have worked on the train, but I was quite pleased.

One downside is that my notifications for new email and texts make the music go silent, instead of say my chat notification, which plays over the music.

I've been uploading for a couple of weeks and was nearly done until I hit a major bug: the music manager says that I've gone over the 20K mark but I've only uploaded just over 10K. I submitted a report and, amazingly, they responded in less than 24 hours: "We're aware of an issue with larger libraries that causes users to prematurely hit the 20,000 song limit, and are working on a fix."

I've actually got a lot more than 10K, maybe over 20K, but I'm only uploading 320kbps AACs newly created from ALACs that themselves were created for my ongoing re-rip project. I convert a few hundred tracks at a time and direct them to a dedicated Google folder. Once uploaded, they're deleted and process is repeated. I put the track titles in various playlists to keep track of progress. It was going swimmingly, until….

As for actually playing the uploaded tracks, well, the web player won't work on my work PC (an "oops" error pops up), whether in IE or Firefox. I tried installing Chrome but some unknown error causes it to fail. We're upgrading to Win7 next month so I'll just wait and see until then.

They will play on my iPhone through Safari but the web player is very mobile unfriendly. Maybe Google or a third party will make a mobile version–not an app but an HTML 5 website for mobiles. I definitely notice a dent in sound quality, however. I don't know if Google actually streams the AACs I uploaded or if they're transcoded into something else.

beetsnotbeats wrote:
Maybe Google or a third party will make a mobile version–not an app but an HTML 5 website for mobiles.

You mean non-Android mobiles.  It's beautiful on my phone…

I have more on this but I'm heading out the door and will give you some feedback in the morning.  I've been working hard with Google to get this right.

beetsnotbeats wrote:
I've been uploading for a couple of weeks and was nearly done until I hit a major bug: the music manager says that I've gone over the 20K mark but I've only uploaded just over 10K. I submitted a report and, amazingly, they responded in less than 24 hours: "We're aware of an issue with larger libraries that causes users to prematurely hit the 20,000 song limit, and are working on a fix."

As suspected, the 20K song limit was an estimate.  In reality folks were originally given an allotment of space that was supposed to be the equivalent of 20K songs.  This caused a bunch of confusion as some folks like me were allowed over 20K songs, and some folks with super high bit rate/large files were limited to less than 20K songs. 

As this played out, I was originally given the right to upload about 23K songs.  As I went to clean up my collection, I was then not allowed to upload anything more until I reduced my number of songs below 20K, so it looks like El Goog is going to be flexible on space, and go by the song limit.  At least for right now. 

beetsnotbeats wrote:
I've actually got a lot more than 10K, maybe over 20K, but I'm only uploading 320kbps AACs newly created from ALACs that themselves were created for my ongoing re-rip project. I convert a few hundred tracks at a time and direct them to a dedicated Google folder. Once uploaded, they're deleted and process is repeated. I put the track titles in various playlists to keep track of progress. It was going swimmingly, until….

This is a similar process to what I did.  I basically deleted my entire upload of 23K songs and am now going through my collection album by album to upload.  It's rather therapeutic and allows me to clean up a lot bad data.

My point here is a caution:  use this move to the cloud to clean up a lot of your data.  I spent two days cleaning up my contacts data, photo's and now I'm cleaning up my music.  If you've got a mess in your multiple hard drives, cleaning it up before you move it to the cloud will save you so much headache.

beetsnotbeats wrote:
As for actually playing the uploaded tracks, well, the web player won't work on my work PC (an "oops" error pops up), whether in IE or Firefox. I tried installing Chrome but some unknown error causes it to fail. We're upgrading to Win7 next month so I'll just wait and see until then.

They will play on my iPhone through Safari but the web player is very mobile unfriendly. Maybe Google or a third party will make a mobile version–not an app but an HTML 5 website for mobiles. I definitely notice a dent in sound quality, however. I don't know if Google actually streams the AACs I uploaded or if they're transcoded into something else.

Those all sound like local errors as I have tested the web version on IE7-9/Firefox/Chrome across WInXP/Vista/7 and various linux derivatives.  They've all played fairly well, with the occasional glitch when I'm doing high bandwidth tasks.

As for playback, it seems to be capped at 320 Kbps so you could be in the sweet spot.  I wish I had done the same when I started ripping.

I kinda suspected that the real limit was total data instead of songs. I mentioned that in my bug report but their response didn't acknowledge it.

Your advice on cleaning up data is good. I've been extremely meticulous with my metadata; I almost always have to clean up the crap that Gracenote sends. But then, I work in a library. Too bad Music Beta doesn't use the "sort artist" field.

I still wonder what's being streamed back. The specs say that FLACs are transcoded into 320kbps MP3s. If AACs are also transcoded to MP3 then the sound quality will suffer. What I heard streamed in my car was definitely inferior to the ALACs I usually hear.

vansmack wrote:
This is a similar process to what I did.  I basically deleted my entire upload of 23K songs and am now going through my collection album by album to upload.  It's rather therapeutic and allows me to clean up a lot bad data.

My point here is a caution:  use this move to the cloud to clean up a lot of your data.  I spent two days cleaning up my contacts data, photo's and now I'm cleaning up my music.  If you've got a mess in your multiple hard drives, cleaning it up before you move it to the cloud will save you so much headache.

totally agree with you, that's what I'm doing

chaz wrote:
Will what you have stored in the cloud be able to serve as a backup if my local storage goes kaput?

Google updated the Music Manager for two way download/upload.  They advertise the service as a back up for your computer crashing:

http://support.google.com/androidmarket/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=1233029&ctx=plusone

Notice that if you download it, it will come in a 320kbps file.  I wonder if I uploaded a song at 128kbps, it returns a 320kbps file?  Interesting and off to test.

Now raise the limit or allow me to purchase more and I'm redesigning my server options.