Most of us, when asked about the default music manager and player we use on our computers, are likely to mention iTunes or Windows Media Player. Both of these, and the other popular desktop media players like Winamp and VLC are useful in their own right but they can only reign over your music as long as you are using your PC.
If you also listen to music on your smartphone or any other such portable device then getting your favorite tracks on them means manually syncing it with the computer, which after a while feels like drudgery.
You need a cloud-based music player that can show up your favorite playlists on any device which can connect to the Internet, be it a smartphone or a public computer in a different continent.
Google Music is an online music manager and streaming service, and also a music store that lets your play your music on the go. When I say that Google Music is an online music streaming service, don’t judge it wrong by comparing it to services like Grooveshark and Earbits. Google music does stream your songs on the clouds, but the songs should come from you. It is also available as an Android app and web based optimized versions for iOS devices.
Let us get started with Google Music and see how it works. Well, firstly, here’s the bad news: Google Music is available only in the US for now. And now the good news: you can easily override your IP using a US proxy and activate Google Music on your account.
Once you get Google Music activated on your Google account, it’s time to upload some music to it. To upload music from your local drive to you can use the Google Music Manager. You can upload as much as 20,000 songs to Google Music Manager for free and the music can be uploaded from iTunes, Windows Media Player or local folders.
Wait!! Don’t upload your whole collection just yet. Just upload few of them as there’s a lot more to it.
Once you have some of your albums uploaded on Google Music, you can play them right away. Just like iTunes, Google also has some auto-playlists with room to create them manually as well. Don’t worry if your music collection is huge. It’s a Google product and thus talking about its searching powers will be a waste of time. Stay rest assured that you’ll be able to find any track in seconds.
Google Music not only serves as an online music manager, but it’s a music store as well. You can buy, listen and download lots of paid and free tracks, and listen to them across all the devices you have Google Music installed on.
My Verdict
Of course, one question that came to my mind was, “Why should I waste my bandwidth to upload the music on the clouds and then again, spend the same bandwidth to stream them?” Well, I realized that’s a small price to pay for the universal access to my favorite songs irrespective of the device I am on (provided it can connect to the world wide web).
Have you tried out Google Music yet? Do you like it?
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