Google has Once Again Stolen Part of My Soul

It didn’t take long after getting my Google Music Beta invite that I fell in love with the service. I was at work when it came across my email, and I didn’t expect to be able to do anything awesome with it before I got home, to the place where my music lives. My understanding at the time was that Google Music was just a cloud MP3 player.

I was very, very wrong.

 

I logged in anyway, thinking I could at least get an idea for what it looked like and maybe learn a little bit about some of it’s features. Something strange happened, though. I told it I didn’t have any music to upload, and it said, “So?”

It then proceeded to ask me what type of music I liked to listen to. Now, I will say it didn’t break them down into the sub-genres upon sub-genres upon sub-genres that you find with Pandora. It was pretty much your basic, “Country, Alternative, Hip Hop.” What did surprise me, though, was how many “free” songs it actually had. Without uploading a single tune, I already had access to over 300 songs in my library.

Other than that, I can say that it is a pretty straightforward media player. It has some features in it, like the ability to take one song and make a quick playlist with a push of a button that will take all of the similar songs from your collection and put them on it.

For someone that is already using iTunes or Windows Media Player with a happy step in their heart, you might not find the charm of Google Music to your liking. For me, though, as a recent Linux-to-Windows migrant, I have had a hard time coming up with a media player that I didn’t think sucked away at my systems resources unnecessarily.

Google gave me that and the ability to listen to my music from any computer in the world, oh, and up to 8 portable devices if I so choose. I do dig cloud computing.

Tags: google, Google Music, Music