[anniebrion]

Anyone else trying out this free service?

So far it has taken about 5 hours to upload 3,127 tracks (just over 50% of my collection) at 16mbps.

Great place to backup your music

https://play.google.com/music/listen?view=manager_pl

The Music Manager works fine in windows 8.

[noise747]

Um, nope. prefer my music to stay on a hard drive

[JasonWatkins]

Originally Posted by anniebrion

Anyone else trying out this free service?

Yeah, i'm giving it a try. I've got 47gb's worth of music though and 8,146 tracks so it might take a while

To be honest, I'm looking at it more as another backup solution - i've got my collection backed up twice over on disc and flash memory, so to have it in "the cloud" as well would be good. I listen to my stuff on my phone and PC normally, so I don't see any major need to stream it from this service though, but we'll see.

[anniebrion]

Mine is 51GB and been running since 10am, I still have over 500 tracks to go.

Its quite handy to stream to my iPad but I'm also using this mainly as an extra backup

20,000 files at a max of 250MB per file is some free space Google are giving

I'm not sure where the matching comes in that is supposed to speed up the upload process if Google already have a track in their catalogue

[whoever,hey]

Originally Posted by noise747

Um, nope. prefer my music to stay on a hard drive

It is pirated?

[noise747]

Originally Posted by whoever,hey

It is pirated?

Nope, it comes from my own CDs, some comes from records.

[noise747]

Originally Posted by anniebrion

Mine is 51GB and been running since 10am, I still have over 500 tracks to go.

Its quite handy to stream to my iPad but I'm also using this mainly as an extra backup

20,000 files at a max of 250MB per file is some free space Google are giving

I'm not sure where the matching comes in that is supposed to speed up the upload process if Google already have a track in their catalogue

That sounds a bit wrong. so if Google have the same track they will use that instead of yours?

i be surprised if nothing is said about that as that is copyright infringement.

[JasonWatkins]

Originally Posted by anniebrion

20,000 files at a max of 250MB per file is some free space Google are giving

Their servers must be creaking with that sort of capacity. They'd better have some bloody good redundancy in place if it all goes Pete Tong !

[Esot-eric]

Originally Posted by noise747

i be surprised if nothing is said about that as that is copyright infringement.

Google have licensing agreements with the big 6 music publishers, so it's not an issue.

Originally Posted by anniebrion

I'm not sure where the matching comes in that is supposed to speed up the upload process if Google already have a track in their catalogue

The matching should be done first. When i set it up around 08:00 the first ~1000 tracks took 10-15 minutes to be matched and added to my library. 14 hours later and it's only uploaded ~500 additional tracks.

[neo_wales]

90GB with thousands of tracks ripped to hard drive...where do I begin lol

I'll not bother with it because I tend to only carry a few dozen tracks with me on my phone and if I travel I have my complete collection on my laptop so there is no point for me but I can see the attraction for others.

[Lyricalis]

I have about 5GB of music . Then again, I bought mine and I'm not really going to bother even digitising all that horrible stuff I bought in the 80s that's still on tape!

[JasonWatkins]

i'm honestly struggling to see the use for this as a personal streaming service. most of us have all the music we'd want to listen to on our phones or music devices anyway, and if we want to listen to music at home, it would either be on a stereo, music device or computer.

it's not like it would be of any use if you went away somewhere, as you'd most likely take some kind of device with you anyway.

As i've said, i like the idea of a cloud-based backup, but that's really about as far as i can see it being useful. Not sure how in-depth this music match service will be though, so i'll have to see when all my stuff is uploaded.

[flynn]

Originally Posted by JasonWatkins

i'm honestly struggling to see the use for this as a personal streaming service

There's now an extra 2.5GB free on my phone that wasn't before. Vital? No. Pretty handy, yes.

[paulj48]

Not sure if this works the same as Itunes Match but if you get a match from your music collection, and your copy of the track is not the greatest quality Itunes allow you to delete your local copy and re-download a higher quality version (the same version you could buy from Itunes) for free.

[LostFool]

Mine has been uploading all night and it's done 10,000 out of 13,500 tracks. I'm not aware that it has done any matching at all.

[paulbrock]

Been using it for around a year, love it!

Originally Posted by JasonWatkins

most of us have all the music we'd want to listen to on our phones or music devices anyway

Clears up a lot of room on a 8gb/16gb phone or tablet for other stuff. Funnily enough, Google offer these sizes....

it's not like it would be of any use if you went away somewhere, as you'd most likely take some kind of device with you anyway.

Well, if I'm round my friend's house, yes I will have my phone with me, but its far quicker just to fire up a browser on their computer and play my music through that rather than sync everything up. Done this a few times. Also means that you're not draining battery life on your phone if you can use an office computer or laptop.

Originally Posted by Esot-eric

Google have licensing agreements with the big 6 music publishers, so it's not an issue.

perhaps not for matching rights.... maybe this is why people are finding not as many matches as they'd might expect.
http://news.cnet.com/8301-1023_3-575...ud-music-fees/

[neo_wales]

Originally Posted by flynn

There's now an extra 2.5GB free on my phone that wasn't before. Vital? No. Pretty handy, yes.

You'll soon fill it with other junk.

[Sue_C]

Husband & I have all our music on the same PC (and backed up as well) We have separate Google accounts.

Google Music might be useful as a secondary back up and could also be useful for streaming. Husband would quite like a Nexus 7 for Christmas, I might upgrade to an Android phone.

If we decide to upload the music should we,
1. Upload everything twice (is that allowed?)
2. Create a separate Google account for music (will that be confusing for apps, books, payment methods later?).
3. Squabble over who owns what and create two upload lists. (is that possible from one PC?)
4. Not bother because it's just too complicated?

I've already uploaded a few albums to Amazon, just to try it out really. If they're already uploaded to Amazon I guess I shouldn't upload them to Google as well?. Amazon's track upload limits are much less than Google's by the way, otherwise I'd stick with them.

[anniebrion]

@Sue_C

You get up to 5TB of space (20,000 tracks) per account so you could upload everything twice

[lettice]

why is this asking for a credit card to register?
hardly free then

[anniebrion]

Originally Posted by lettice

why is this asking for a credit card to register?
hardly free then

The payment details are for if you want to purchase tracks from their service, AFAIK you don't have to give them details to access the free service.

Just download the music manager from the link in my first post.

[lettice]

Originally Posted by anniebrion

The payment details are for if you want to purchase tracks from their service, AFAIK you don't have to give them details to access the free service.

Just download the music manager from the link in my first post.

that link takes me to a google play sign in page that wont let me go anywhere unless i give them my credit card, no way an i doing that

[anniebrion]

Originally Posted by lettice

that link takes me to a google play sign in page that wont let me go anywhere unless i give them my credit card, no way an i doing that

Ah when I put in my CC details the system crashed and the transaction failed but I was still sent to the manager download

[late8]

The service requires you to upload ALL of your music files = a very long time if you have a lot of them.

My connection is 8Mbps Down but only 400kbps Up.... it has taken over a day to upload half of my collection of only 3,100 songs at 320bit rate.

[JasonWatkins]

Originally Posted by flynn

There's now an extra 2.5GB free on my phone that wasn't before. Vital? No. Pretty handy, yes.

If you've got a phone that doesn't have a MicroSD card slot then that's fair enough, but many of them do nowadays. I've got a 64gb MicroSD card in my S3 that stores my entire collection so I really don't need to take the space up anywhere else.

Originally Posted by paulbrock

Well, if I'm round my friend's house, yes I will have my phone with me, but its far quicker just to fire up a browser on their computer and play my music through that rather than sync everything up. Done this a few times. Also means that you're not draining battery life on your phone if you can use an office computer or laptop

That's very fair - I suppose I didn't really look at it like that. I'm so used to having had an iPod or my phone over the years that I take everywhere that I didn't really consider that possibility.

I suppose if you're at a mates house and you want them to hear a great new album you've got, it would be a doddle to just log in to the music manager and find it to play right there.

Popped out at 10am this morning and left the uploader running at 800 songs. Got back about half an hour ago and it's done about 4,200 all told so it's going ok - still got the same again to do though !