Is Google Music for You?

We all like to have a lot of our music readily accessible on our portable devices.  It is handy for exercising and just to share songs as we are on road trips or with friends and family.  When Google released their music package, naturally our curiousity was piqued.

We had our staff member who owns an Android Evo try out this service.  Technically it can work with the iPhone, but getting a App is necessary or at least recommended and our thought was it would be better to test the program within Google owned and developed technologies.  We wanted to try this on an Android because of this thought.

So, 5,500 songs in this database, what was the experience?

First of all, the uploading time is brutal.  The 5,500 songs took our high speed internet connection over a day to upload all the music.  Way longer than we expected this to take and we can normally pull a 50MB file in under a minute…  the 40GB of music, we thought might take an hour or two and was shocked that it took just over 30 hours.  For an average user with home based cable, assume at least an hour per GB of music.  If you are an audiophile while 15,000 songs, you may want to set this computer aside as you may not see it for 3 or 4 days!

When the songs were loaded, an odd thing happens with the artists.  If you have a artist like Billy Joel doing “We Didn’t Start the Fire” on an 80′s hits CD, it will display that CD under the artist Billy Joel, but then when you click it, it shows all the song names, but not the artist in that list.  It’s cool in one way, as you can see all the albums and you don’t have to go to the “Albums” tab in order to get all the songs, but annoying if you are not sure what song you had from the 80′s hit CD.

Google Music has some other quirky things too, but it does work extremely well, and now there are over 6,000 songs on my phone (they give you about 500 for free…)  “I would recommend it as a cool solution, but not flawless” was our experience.