So this is happening.

Cloud storage, free "for a limited time" and limited, for now(?), to 20,000 tunes.

Thoughts? Me, cautious optimism. I look forward to getting an invite, which as of now only went out to the people at I/O this morning. My biggest initial concern is how, let's say hassle free, this thing is gonna be. Launching without approval or cooperation from the RIAA is a good sign, and of course google could LITERALLY BUY THE MUSIC INDUSTRY if they so desired, but then they apparently said they would comply if rights holders had evidence of infringement. I guess they kinda have to say that, but it looks like fears of google handing over customers to the RIAA are unnecessary.

Going Flash is a ###### move though. It doesn't really affect me at the moment, but I have no intention of buying a Xoom. 20k song limit is a bummer too. Still, I like the idea of a service like this. I keep all my stuff on an external drive, it's too big to lug around on trips (or from room to room for that matter) so having everything in the cloud would be swell. I think I'd even be willing to pay when the time comes, assuming it's cheap. But then Apple will be inevitably be doing this same thing...

I meant to post about this yesterday, but lazed out. I like the idea, but I don't know if I'd ever use it on the go. If I'm at work, I throw on Last.fm and if that doesn't fly I'll stream Live 105 that pretty much takes care of me. Plus, I've got my Zune and a Sansa Clip for more on the go music. But, let me know if you like it and swing me an invite and I'll definitely check it out.

I just uploaded all my photos and vidoes to Snapfish to make room on my Mac, it's free (for now) too, and I wouldn't mind paying for the service. I was also thinking how nice it would be to have mass storage like that for music, but I have to agree with Red, I wouldn't use it for anything but storage because we have other means to stream and devices. I'd take an invite!! You introduced me to Gmail back when that first came out and I've been loving it ever since!! " )

Dreamstation.cc Mail > Google Mail

(And yeah, I realize it's the same exact thing, but @dreamstation.cc ftw)

I use both, and I use the DSCC address especially when I want to promote the site.

Maybe between this and the Amazon cloud thing you can get a good majority of your music taken care of?

I've actually been messing around with the Amazon cloud thing a little bit. It seems pretty solid. I actually saw one review of Google Music that liked Amazon better at the moment, but it was over fairly trivial stuff that I'm sure will be ironed out soon. The big problem with Amazon is that after the free space, it gets expensive FAST. $1/GB per year, which is cheap enough if you aren't uploading much, but I'm the kind of person with external storage in the terabytes so my tunes don't overrun my internal HD.

The other thing is, it's too early to commit to any service. It looks like Apple's is about ready and, if for no other reason than integration with everything else, I feel like I'll be better off there or with Google.

Just got my google music beta invite today, going to give it a try and see what happens.

Got mine, and uploaded my small library. *Does not work with last.fm/scrobbling. I suppose I will use it for storage for now. I don't see anything new or special with it, other than it is free online storage. Meh.

What is this last.fm/scrobbling I keep hearing about? What is it? How does that work?

Oh yeah?



bOb, it is this.


So I've been playing with this and amazon's cloud player for a few weeks. Google wins. If only because Amazon's is way to expensive to bother with. Also it froze a couple times. And I haven't even used it that much. Google has had a bit of lag here and there, but that was my connection not the player, and it always quickly recovered, Amazon just died. The biggest complaint I see about Google is that uploading is soooo sloooowww. This is true. But so what? I'm guessing that's temporary and once your tunes are there, they're there, it's a one time problem. That you can only upload folders not individual tracks is a minor issue (my library is way bigger than 20,000 songs so I'm going folder by folder) but nothing major, and I have had a handful of failed uploads, but whatev, just try again, problem solved. I like the layout for the most part, but I could use a little customization, once I get more than a couple thousand tracks uploaded it's gonna be a huge hassle to browse. Oh and apparently Gmail does not yet recognize tracks being played in Google Music. For the most part, I'm really digging it. Though iCloud does sound intriguing, also terrifying.

...and yet, I still don't have an invite.

Red, I looked for an option to invite- I don't see one. I clicked a sign up link on the google homepage...I didn't get an invite{from a friend} either.

No, for now you can only get invited by Google. Also, I have two Google Music accounts.