After almost five weeks of waiting patiently, I was finally “invited” to join Google Music Beta. I love the idea of my music (and docs, wallet and medical record) residing on the G-Cloud, making them accessible from anywhere.
I have no idea how many songs I have on my computer, but according to Music Beta there are 403 in the folders I selected. Not very many, when the maximum is 20,000 per account.
I happily uploaded my measly 403 songs, from my 15 folders, which took about 40 minutes on wireless. While this was happening I checked out the Music Beta “About” web page. No “useful” info about bandwidth usage, etc., but there was a nice video introduction. Chris states, “You can spend more time listening to your music and less time managing your music.” Whew, what a relief to hear.
The video is slick. Artists, Albums and Genres, quick and easy play lists, instant mix and scrolling. Lots of scrolling. It was an omen.
I scroll left, I scroll right. No folders. 400 songs listed, in order, by artist, album or genre. Ugh. I start scrolling for Warren Zevon. What genre is “Laywers, Guns and Money?” What album? (I had him in my 70’s folder.)
All of my folders are gone. I had three folders for Holiday music: traditional, modern and adult. Now Alvin and The Chipmunks are getting jiggy with Akon. Most of the 365 beautiful days of the year, I have no need for Christmas carols. Why are they in my daily mix? Please offer to turn each folder that contains music into a play list or enable folders.
Why do I have to click through the album page when I only have a single song? Who releases albums? What is an album? How old is this team? Music is released on “CDs” or “Disks” now. As in, “I have a disk dropping on the 28th.” Which means my CD will be released on that date. Most of the music on the disk has already been available online, in the Google Music Store. Who needs a disk? Please enable the “Album” field to be hidden. Genre needs some tweaking, too.
Does Google Music Beta push down a copy to my SD, every time I listen to a song? If a standard CD can hold 700 MB and play for 80 minutes, am I using the equivalent bandwidth to listen to music? Roughly ½ GB an hour? Will all 403 songs eventually end up on my phone, if I listen to them once?
Can I “share” Music Beta play lists? Can I use the music for cool things like hold music or let it keep playing while I’m on the phone?
I don’t believe the “insta-mix” function is working quite right yet. If it was searching a folder, instead of the entire collection, it might produce better results. This is not ready for prime time:
The User Interface could take some lessons from existing app manager widgets. One Layout for listening could use a vertical scrolling menu on the left side, for the play list and a horizontal scrolling menu on the bottom, for Google Music Beta suggestions.
My second biggest issue, (folders is #1) is if I drill down from Artist to listen to a song, I have to back click all the way out. The headphone widget, top left of play view, should take me all the way back to Artist, not step back through album.
Overall grade: Technical Functionality, A+, User Interface, C-. That’s why they call it Beta. I will be happy to help you sort it all out.
The beat goes on,
Perk
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