Google Music, the streaming music answer to Amazon, MOG and Rdio, is here. You can access music in the cloud and stream to devices. But unlike MOG and Rdio, you can only play what you upload.
How do you use it? You use Google's Music Manager on your desktop to add your songs to the service. It adds play counts and ratings as well. It's a "full featured music manager", so you can search and do all the other things you could in iTunes and Windows Media Player.
Here's a look at some of its features:
• Library Upload: With the Music Manager app, you can upload your iTunes or Windows Media Player libraries with one click. You can also upload by file or folder.
• Offline Listening: It's a pretty standard feature, but Google's gives this feature a neat twist by automatically caching songs you've recently listened to. I'd also love to see them do this for most listened songs. And of course, you can also cache specific songs you select. Necessary, since you can't re-download music from the service.
• Seamlessness: Any change you make to your Google Music library on one device is automatically pushed to other devices.
• Playlists: Once you upload your tracks to the Google Music cloud, you can play around with it just like it was in a music app. That means playlists which automatically sync across all your connected devices. They also have a smart playlist feature called instant mix, which will automatically build a list for you based on one song. It's like iTunes' genius or Pandora's recommendation bot. Google says that they have servers actually listening to the songs to make their playlist selection.
The service can store up to 20,000 songs per user on up to eight authorized devices and took five minutes or so for the first 150 songs to upload.
But you don't always have an internet connection, or a good enough one to stream music. So you can either select certain music to cache on your device, and the service automatically caches your recently listened-to music as well.
You can request an invitation to Music Beta here.
