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Comment by cypherpunks01 | Hacker News Reader

From the screenshot, it looks even less useful than Amazon's player.

You have to upload all of your own music yourself, which would take forever for anyone who has a collection big enough that they can't carry on their phone or ipod. Also, there is absolutely no conceivable benefit to musicians. At least amazon allows you to easily buy albums.

There doesn't appear to be any useful additional functionality either. Social interaction, concert ticket listings, artist info, last.fm tag data, lyrics and all the other things I'd want from a google music service don't look like they're going to be available.

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I think you forget the core value: listen to your music everywhere.

That isn't compelling?

It is, and that's exactly what I used to do with a Linux box running as a dedicated jukebox for both my home stereo and for internet streaming. It was terrific.

Then I got an iPod.

Yes, that is quite a compelling feature, but I feel like there's nothing revolutionary about it. The non-technically-inclined have been using Grooveshark for a few years to do that, and nerds can just run their own streaming mp3 servers. I'm just a bit disappointed that there isn't any nice functionality like I mentioned above - this seems like just another cloud storage service with a decent and simple Flash interface on top.

http://www.subsonic.org/pages/index.jsp

Has Android and iOS clients, and is also accessible via the web. It's not as clean and polished as I'd like, but it works reliably enough for my tastes and is fully open sourced.

Cool, I'll just upload all my music, turn on my car radio, and ... hey wait a minute.

1. Upload music. 2. Turn on car radio 3. Connect smartphone to car radio

This is what I do.

Now I just need my phone to auto-realize it's in the car and start playing music over Bluetooth or something to the car stereo. Too bad I have an iPhone - if I had an Android I'd be tempted to implement this myself.

You can use Tonido (http://www.tonido.com) to stream your home music collection.It has native mobile apps for iOS,Android, Blackberry and w7.

It's compelling, but it feels like catchup.

And I can't see why Google didn't go farther. Whatever Apple's rebranded MobileMe turns out to be, it's almost certainly going to be more ambitious than Google and Amazon's services. Google has to know that. I just don't see why they didn't really act on it.

> ...upload all of your own music yourself, which would take forever...

Does anyone know if they actually upload the files, or just upload if a hash of the file doesn't exist? I have a hard time believing that Google hasn't already thought of this. I imagine that less than 5% of your music actually has to go over the wire once google has a large collection of music on their servers.

I can't speak for Google, but Amazon doesn't do it. It took 41 hours to upload my collection (not counting podcasts, which for whatever absurd reason are not supported) to Cloud Player and I have a 15mbps fios connection. If I had a regular cable modem or whatever I probably wouldn't have bothered.

Whoa, that quiet ridiculous. Why wouldn't they hash/check the files before ? Is there any good reason ?

It's probably some sort of tactical play to keep the record labels from shutting them down.

You are probably right, though they should just call it "distributed hash compression technology for super-fast uploads", rather than "if we already have a copy of that song, it doesn't need to be re-uploaded".

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UMG_v._MP3.com

I agree .. when i had my music collection saved/backed up on 3 different hard-drives which all crashed I had 5,000 songs. Overall that would take me way to long to upload and manage!

These days Pandora, YouTube and Vevo on my iPhone or other computing devices provides me with a better experience; free, instant access wherever, no worries about hard drive crashing & no need to upload/manage tons and tons of songs...

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