Sunday, May 15, 2011

Google Music Beta Review

Last week Google announced the launch of it's online music service - Google Music Beta - at the annual Google I/O Conference. As expected, it received a lot of attention from the Tech media and also as has been the case with some of the newer Google products the beta is 'By Invite Only' to begin with. You can go to the homepage and request an invitation now. Someone from the team was kind enough to send me an invite last evening and I have been playing around with it since then.

In a nutshell Google Music helps you to upload and manage your entire music collection to/in the cloud, sync it with your Google account and then listen to it at anytime from any machine or mobile phone as long as you have access to the Internet through a browser or a mobile app. Some of the innovative features are listening to free songs available through the Music app and something called 'Instant Mix' which creates a playlist from your list of songs based on the kinds of songs you select. Also, if you don't have internet access at all times the Music app keeps some songs, the ones you listen to most often, cached so that you can hear them while offline.

I took screenshot of the steps involved in the installation process and producing it below. You can also find a video of the launch demo at the end of the post.

Though I am not the greatest music afficianado, a big, geeky thumbs up from my side to the product!

The email invite


Landing Page on music.google.com




Terms of Service
You can add free songs to your library at this stage


Prompt to download the 'Music Manager' app to be installed on the machine where you have your songs


The Android Market place which hosts the Google Music app


Unfortunately I couldn't install it on my Nexus S as the app is not available in India


Installing the Music Manager on the machine


Now you need to sign in using your Google account


You can select how you want to sync your songs


You have the option of updating the Google Music library automatically when you add new songs to your machine


Adding the songs to the Msuic Manager



And we're ready to listen to music on the browser!


That's the inside look at the Google Music player, with the songs being constantly added.


Finally, here's an official video explaining and demonstrating Google Music.

2 comments:

Nikhil said...

This product's available only in US. So how did you get to test this? Maybe, its another privilege to be a Googler..eh?

Suhel Banerjee said...

Yes, one of those little things:)