Google Music

Google Music is a simple, online music player that uses your music library to play from.  This differs from Pandora, Last.fm, or other music services, which acts more as a radio than an online hard drive of your computer.  While Pandora will help you with discovering new music you may or may not like, Google Music only plays songs you actually want to listen to.  I prefer the latter as I hate having to repeatedly, manually skip songs I don't like in Pandora.  

GUI

Setting up Google Music can be rather annoying, however.  First, it's necessary to upload your music library, which in my case was over 2,800 songs and 16 GBs.  This process relies on your specific bandwidth and can be troublesome for some.  Second, Google's Music Manager can search your music files through either iTunes or the Music folder.  I chose iTunes because that's where I manually edit all my songs - whether it's album art, genre, or composers, etc.  I expect my edits to carry over to Google's database.  The problem with this is, for some reason, some files keep their original ID3 tags from whenever I acquired them from the Internet.  My ADD for proper music organization hates this aspect and tedious, manual editing would be necessary.  I have a suspicion however, that ID3 tags are supposed to be managed by iTunes itself and that it should be the one to edit those specific .mp3 files.  


Anyways, apart from those troubles, the rest of my expectations are delivered.  Standard music player controls are included, such as play, pause, shuffle, repeat, etc. as well as nonstandard such as thumbs up/down rating system and auto/manual playlists.  I myself, don't have an Android device, but it seems accounts can be linked to them and thus, allowing you to have a portable music player that doesn't have to take up phone/tablet memory.

Yeah, I listen to myself.  Doesn't everyone?

One last, probably MOST important thing:  Google Music is currently in beta and requires an invitation to be used.  As discussed in class, exclusivity does have its allure.