You can mark 2011 as the year your music went online, and it was good.
Helping to make that a reality is Google’s announcement of Music Beta. Google Music Beta is a cloud service similar to Amazon’s Cloud Player. You upload your music to Music Beta and it’s instantly available anywhere you have a connection to the net, including many mobile devices. Music can even keep recent tracks and specified albums available when you don’t have a connection.
The only catch, for now, is that it’s invite only.
Google’s Music Beta sounds like a very exciting cloud service. It all starts with you uploading your music to the cloud. This process seems very simple and even promises to automatically add new content when you add it to your iTunes library.
Since it’s on the net, it doesn’t have to come from just one machine; it’s no problem at all if your tunes are scattered across many computers. And once it’s online, it’s always available. No need to worry about storage space or syncing.
One of the coolest features is offline listening. Music Beta will store your most recently listened to tracks, just in case your connection vanishes. That way, you still have something to listen to without having to resort to whatever you may have on your device the old fashion way. With the Android app (and hopefully an iOS app someday) you can even select specific albums to always keep on hand.
Just like iTunes, you can create playlists. Again, since this is a cloud service, if you create a playlist with your computer, it will be available on your mobile device instantly as well. There’s even a Genius-like feature called Instant Mix to help create playlists on the fly by just selecting a single song.
Currently, Google Music Beta is just that, a beta. Google has a long history of having feature rich betas, but you’ll need to get an invite to try this one out. Also, there’s no word on iOS support at the moment. I have to believe it’s all part of the plan, just not yet. So, for now, Music Beta is just for a select few who’d be able to better access the features with Android devices.
Still, if you’re at all interested, you should request an invite, like, now. If you’re selected, you’ll be able to upload up to 20,000 tracks for free, which should be more than enough to cover nearly all legal music libraries.
Product [Google Music Beta]
No comments:
Post a Comment