September, 2011

The dependency on connectivity and lack of mass storage makes Chrome OS a specialised product. Google are trying to over come these limitations by adding offline access for Gmail (source), and limited offline support for Documents and Calendar. However, those do not help the with restricted and limited storage on Chrome OS devices.

The issue of limited local storage meant that keeping your music collection on a Chromebook was not practical. Since everything in Chrome OS is done in the cloud, Google came up with a cloud based solution to let users listen to their music.

Once invited to Google Music, you need to install the Music Manager application on your desktop or laptop computer. Compatibility isn’t a problem, as it’s available for Windows, OSX, and Linux. The application scans your system for music and then uploads. The Music Manager is really simple to use. There are option to set how often it will check for new music, but the defaults are fine. The only speed bump in the process is waiting for all your music to upload. Just make sure you don’t exceed your ISP’s data cap though! There is an upload limit of 20,000 songs, rather than a data limit. Regardless, it’s unlikely most people will hit that limit.

Once your music is uploaded, simply visit music.google.com (or install the Chrome application) to browse and stream your tunes.

Poorly tagged albums is something that you don’t often get to read about in music application reviews. For instance, albums with more than one artist, in which the tracks don’t have their Album artist tag set, are often not treated gracefully by music applications. The result is usually that the album is split into a separate entry for each artist.

Fortunately, Google Music allows you to edit track information, so these errors can be fixed in the cloud. I had the album artist problem with a mix tape album I compiled. Even though I edited the tags online, the album was still split into multiple entries, so it doesn’t work all the time. To make matters worse, the Google Music Manager will not re-upload files that have been changed on your home computer. Remember though, this is still in beta!

Google Music has a cool trick called “Instant Mix”. Just open a menu on any track, select the appropriate option, and a playlist of 25 similar songs is instantly created. This will be familiar to iTunes users who use Genius Mixes. Some might say it’s too similar, but if you’re not living in the Apple world, it’s nice to have that functionality elsewhere.

To complement the desktop and Chromebook experience, Google Music Beta is available on some Android smartphones. It’s available as an update to the standard Music application.

The mobile client integrates music found on the memory card with tracks in the cloud. The application also makes your instant mixes available. Tracks only available online can either be downloaded or streamed, which competes with Spotify’s functionality.

It would be difficult to justify not making Google Music available to Android handsets, but the use case is rather questionable. As the BBC recently uncovered, the mobile broadband coverage in the UK is very patchy, which means the stream could easily run dry while you’re on the move. What’s more, heavy streaming will eat into those infamous unlimited data plans. Lastly and most importantly from my view, constant streaming will heavily drain the battery. Power management is already a big shortcoming with Android devices.

Google Music is only available via invite; users start with four invites, but these top up over time. Admittance has largely been limited to the United States, but there have been times when UK users, including myself, have been able to join. So if you receive an invite, it’s worth persisting!

The situation is more hit and miss with Android devices. Having tested a Nexus One, Nexus S, Milestone 2, and Dell Streak; only the Nexus One could receive the Music update. That phone originated from the United States, so it is likely to be a location issue again.

As mentioned above, the use case for Google Music is questionable. Most people will already have their tunes saved to their laptop and smartphone, and so streaming would be quite wasteful. However, if you’re never far away from WiFi and are completely entrenched in the Google cloud with little dependence on local files, then this might be worth a try. Crucially though, there’s still no way to purchase music and have it added to your account – everything has to be uploaded, which perhaps undermines the original idea.

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