Tuesday, June 21, 2011

Google Music Beta Impressions


I've been playing with it for awhile. I'm actually quite impressed with this whole saving your music on the cloud. The UI is silky smooth and very sleek. The newest update addresses several bugs and adds deleting songs the SD card. I've uploaded a very small portion of my library to try it out and it's just like having my PMP. I find the "offline caching" to be quite useful especially if you don't have a wireless connection.

The only thing I don't like about Google Music Beta is the album art. My album art is totally messed up. On my PMP, I deleted all traces of the album art because well...I don't like it. Now that I uploaded my music, the album art shows up. I have songs with and without album art now lol....Not really a complaint but rather a surprise.

Also, I have a tiered data plan of only 200mb/month. Streaming music via 3g would cost a bunch but I have settings configured to only stream via wifi. It's a quite useful setting especially if you don't have unlimited data.

Right now, I'm not sure if this will replace my PMP. I know the hard drive on that thing is going to go soon so I figured saving my music to the cloud just in case would be prudent. Overall, for a Beta release, it's quite good. For those hardcore music lovers out there, this release wouldn't replace PowerAMP. Though, if Google tweaks it a bit more, I think it'll be something great. 

EDIT: It seems that since Google doesn't have any licensing from companies, you can only upload your songs. You can't redownload them. No biggie. I'm sure Google will find a solution to this.