Google Music Review

I've been deeply involved in the new Google Beta Service, Google Music.

It is free right now, so this is the best time to get in if you have a huge digital music collection.  Please don't ask me for an invite, they are not doing that with this one yet.   Click Here To Go To The Home Page and sign up for an invitation.  I signed up for mine 6 months ago.

I have presently uploaded over 4,000 songs and sound files to the service, and I have just over 4800 to go.  At cable internet upload speeds with a wireless N+ extreme router, I am uploading just under 900 songs per day.

I don't want to upload all of my songs and soundfiles.  I don't need the sounds from the PC Version of Worms or Angry Birds available to me from the cloud at all times.  Here is the issue.  You can select individual files one at a time, whole folders or whole hard drives.  I have 6tb of hard drives hooked up to my desktop at any given time, and more than 25 tb of total hard drive storage.  Luckily my music and sound files are all backed up on only 3 of these hard drives, so I have to upload them one hard drive at a time.

This would be much more simple if the Music Manager simply created a list of files it is going to upload, and you could go in and select single files or Ctrl. select multiple files to delete from the upload list.  Rather than adding each file one at a time, or waiting until they are uploaded to delete them.  This is my one gripe on the PC side of the program.  Other than that, it is fast, great and has a simple sleek UI, as you would come to expect from a Google Product.

The program seems to be able to seamlessly select and upload exactly every file in the target directory that can make sounds, even if the Google Music Player is not capable of playing that kind of file.  Another interesting feature is that it will upload your entire ITUNES or Windows Media Player collection.  Songs with seemingly modern DRM, it skips and adds to a list of songs it skipped.  It may be that it is able to overcome older DRM files, as it both uploads and plays them.
On the portable device side this is a great program on a laptop or netbook.  On an Android Portable Device, it works really well with Wi-Fi, and when your signal is great.  It has some obvious drawbacks when the signal is bad.  It is easy to make playlists, but with 4000 sound files, it takes some time for it to update the list of available tracks.  When you have made a sufficient play list to last several hours, it is a good idea to restart your device after playing it for that long, as it seems to have some trouble releasing the available memory on the device, even after the program has exited.
What I am concerned about, but don't know or haven't figured out, is if it is able to update uploads of directories that it has already uploaded without reuploading songs it has already stored.  You want it to be able to scan a folder for songs it has not yet uploaded and just take the new files.  I haven't had any new files since I started using it, so I haven't had the chance to see if that is built in yet.
A small issue is songs that are poorly tagged or lack any tagging at all, they all go into a "Various Artists" category.  So make sure your music is properly tagged for your best convenience later.
Overall, I am in love with the concept, and thrilled that I got in on it while it is free.  At a possible 4-10 cents per track, my collection could have been pretty costly.  I hope that they will make it available for video as well, as that seems to be the direction that Apple's ICloud disaster seems to be going in.  Sorry to all you IPhone/Ipad users who will have to pay through the nose for that service (rumored to have upstream and downstream charges for everything, and a monthly access fee).  Were I an IPhone user (we are considering it in October) I would maintain an Android device such as a tablet or phone, just to have access to this service.  Then again Apple could suprise us and do something "competey" and try to stay on the low end of the price structure, who knows?
(Competey - who do I think I am, Sarah Palin?)