Google Music: The Best Service That Nobody’s Using | Hacker News Reader

Google Music: The Best Service That Nobody’s Using

thepowerbase.com

59 pointsbigmetalman75 comments

I installed Google Music to my MacBook Pro a few months ago. It kept prompting me with the install screen, long after I'd dragged it into my apps folder.

I didn't use it and uninstalled it by dragging the app icon into the trash. Didn't work.

I tried the AppDelete path. No go.

I googled around and found I was not the only one. Uninstall is broken and you are basically stuck with a prompt twice a day to install the Google Music app until you reinstall your OS or go slogging through the guts of your box, throwing switches you don't understand by mixing internal uninstall tutorials (ok, to be fair, this is how you do just about everything...).

In conclusion, that app is a daily annoyance and I'd caution people against installing it.

Slightly related note:

This seems to be a trend lately in Google's desktop software that I'm not comfortable with. On both my Linux and Mac machines 'ps aux | grep -i chrome' shows background processes running long after I've quit Chrome.

I don't see any GUI options to turn these off (there used to be an option in 'about: flags' that I think was related), and I have to end up killing them from the command line.

Not cool, Google.

Well, there is a GUI option for that: http://i.imgur.com/ENMmC.png

I have the same problems, and have considered dumping my OS (Windows) and re-installing it from scratch just to get rid of the two errors I get constantly.

All it does is serve as a reminder not to use or install any other Google app.

You should try http://www.audiogalaxy.com. I think you'll like it. Don't take my word for it though - I've built it. Look up user reviews on iTunes/Android.

Do you use html5 for playing the music, or do you need flash? That's kind of my only big negative for google music, apart from the upload instead of indexing, it relies on flash for playing the music even though it is a html5-site.

HTML5 when available, Flash otherwise. It depends on the source audio format, and the browser you're using. http://www.schillmania.com/projects/soundmanager2/ drives our playback on the website for most cases.

Your stat counter is almost identical to that on the front page of Apple.com..

Heh, theirs has a bigger number and flips much faster. This style of counter is pretty common, afaik.

Yeah, it was popularized by physical tally counters [1], long before it made it into software UI.

They are still used sometimes at concerts or carnivals to tally up people entering a location for records keeping, and to make sure that you're under fire code.

I have one of these counters too, but I only use it on the range to keep track of how many targets I've hit by sheer chance. ;)

[1] http://9cloud.us/c/general/pictures/album/36357/id/1239690/

Oh man, the OS X integration utility is remarkably obnoxious. I wasn't pleased that it was getting a bit more into the guts of my system than expected without letting me know (although the system authentication request at the beginning was clearly a tip off, assuming I'm remembering correctly). After completing the install I suddenly had a Google Music menu icon and the app was accessible only through my system prefs pane. I much prefer Amazon's approach with their standalone application.

I've also had issues where the app wanted to completely reupload my entire library. No thanks---I now just keep it set to monitor an empty directory.

> no known digital music distributor has gone through the trouble of weaving personally identifying information into each track they sell, and if they did, it would be a much bigger deal than a few bootlegs getting uploaded into Google Music.

Err... Actually iTunes weaves your ID into files you buy and nobody seemed to notice evidently (so it wasn't a big deal).

Amazon does too. It's a music industry thing. See http://uits.umusic.com/faq.htm

Amazon doesn't do that to all tracks, and they tell you when they do.

Maybe he means watermarks? The stuff iTunes adds is just metadata. It’s easy to remove. I don’t think anyone could be outraged about that (Why the hell would anyone be?) but watermarks might well cause a different reaction.

It might as well be a watermark. I don't think anyone removes it.

I'd like to mention that iTunes Match is a similar service for Apple customers, the integration with Apple products has been better than Google's integration with droid IMO.

It's not free, but at just over $2 a month, it seems to give Apple a lot more flexibility with bargaining with the publishers, which makes me feel a bit more secure about the future of the service and my personal music collection.

Also, it's surprisingly nice to have it match against songs that are already uploaded to their service, It took over a month to get my entire library into the Google Music cloud, yet all my music was available in iTunes match within the hour.

The fact that iTunes Match does not stream content puts it in a separate class of service than Google Music and Amazon Cloud Player, in my opinion.

Apple says at http://www.apple.com/itunes/itunes-match/ that iTM is a streaming service, though I've not used it so can't personally confirm.

"Does iTunes Match stream or download songs? On a computer, any songs stored in iCloud will stream over the air when played, though you can download them at any time by clicking the iCloud download button. iOS devices will start playing tracks from iCloud as they download and will store them so that you can listen to them later even if you don’t have a network connection. Apple TV only streams songs."

Yes, the only real difference is that, given sufficient local storage, the song will also get copied to your local device. This seems like an advantage IMO.

On a desktop or a device, you can play the music "from the cloud" without the whole song being on your computer. That's streaming enough.

I want to like it, but it's not doing what I want. I have a ton of music on my Android phone, but app won't sync from a phone, only from a desktop computer. The corroloary to this is that music I get from outside the Android market (e.g. friends, random downloads, Amazon MP3) is invisible to the cloud unless I copy it manually.

And the Linux app sucks rocks. My memory is that it's an enormous pain to get installed on F16/x86-64. It doesn't understand the standard proxy environment variables or gconf settings, and in fact when used behind a proxy, THE UI LOCKS UP SOLID a few seconds after starting. So I can't use it at work. (Because who wants to listen to music at work?)

I wouldn't even care, except that I have to use the desktop app. Even things that I'd think would work as web apps aren't there. You can't upload from a web app. You can't manage play lists from a web app.

That said, the Android player app is actually not bad at all, and I do use it. But the cloud side of the equation is a total fail from my perspective.

Same experience here, and the situation on the iPhone is even worse: there's not even a native first-party app.

I've played with Google Music for quite some time and while its a really great service I have one major gripe... Data Usage!

For some reason Google Music will use almost 2.5x the amount of data that Pandora or Spotify use on my phone. (Keep in mind this is with Background data and High quality streaming turned OFF!)

In this mobile data cap / throttle world that we live in I can't afford to have my music app use more than 2gb of a data a month!

I would pay $$ for Google Music.

I have loaded up a bunch of old radio shows & lectures for which I would not have the space on my phone but w/ Google Music I'm all set.

If the team can figure out easy streaming podcasts (like Android Double Twist but without so much spammy/crap content) they will have themselves a nice little business

He talks about some issues of if you have pirated music, google wouldn't likely be able to target you, but that is nonsense. A ripped copy of a song put up online can be as unique as a fingerprint (and if put up by a record company, could have a fingerprint). This could be detected by google, and they could report you.

But, it isn't illegal to own pirated music. It is just illegal to distribute them. So perhaps this isn't a problem?

  > A ripped copy of a song put up online can be
  > as unique as a fingerprint

If they are just MD5'ing the file, then changes to the metadata could cause this fingerprint to change.

  > But, it isn't illegal to own pirated music. It is
  > just illegal to distribute them. So perhaps this
  > isn't a problem?

Record companies (IIRC) have successfully argued that streaming your own music to yourself is a 'broadcast/performance' to a single person. There are many ways that they could attempt to go after this.

It's trivial to just skip the header and metadata sectors, and just MD5/SHA the actual bitstream. With a bit more compute resources you can do the same for the decompressed audio stream, but that'd likely prove less advantageous.

That's interesting, as I use Exact Audio Copy with Accurate Rip, which actually compares my rips to other user's rips to ensure it was done properly. This means that I have FLAC files that would compare to other user's; sans the differences in Metadata.

Well, when the BSA^wRIAA auditors come to your door, you'll just have to show them your CD collection! If you don't have any pirated material, then you have nothing to hide!

I actually no longer keep CDs. Since no one sells lossless music, aside from mostly indie artists, I purchase used CDs, which I then rip and throw away (Amazon is a great source for used CDs, by the way).

I like having lots of music, and paying for it, but I am not a fan of owning a physical CDs.

Presumably that's checksumming the decoded output, not the compressed bitstream.

But in theory, if you are using the same version of the encoder, with the same settings, it should be pretty easy to end up with a bit identical compressed copy also, at least easy enough that it happens occasionally.

> it isn't illegal to own pirated music

IANAL, but it was always my impression that that owning and pirating music was illegal, but it was just that the lucrative civil damages suits come from targeting distributors. If Google Music becomes a central hosting platform, then subpoenaing them for information about customers with known contraband music might become trivial technically and therefore economically feasible.

Bring it to Canada and I'll add one more to the user count gladly. (yes, I know I can jump through hoops to do it now in a limited fashion)

Pro tip for fellow Canadian residents:

1. Login to Google Music once from an American IP address.

2. Use it forever from any IP address.

Try Audiogalaxy - our users prefer it to Google Music, and it's available worldwide. http://www.audiogalaxy.com

Also on a Mac. I had noticed the DMG for the Google Music Manager opening repeatedly, but I chalked it up to a Finder window being open during a shutdown or reboot. Interesting that you can't stop it.

My workflow is the following:

1. Wait for Amazon MP3 special for album I want

2. Buy album

3. Download to Mac with MP3 downloader

4. Sync Google Music with iTunes library.

5. Stream Google Music to phone and browser at work.

This way I have a physical master to use how I see fit. Prices are usually better on Amazon than iTunes store, $4 per album unless I'm buying from a personal favorite on release day. Selection is basically universal.

I've been liking this scrobbler/lyrics looker-upper for the web client:

http://www.danielslaughter.com/projects/google-music-with-la...

My overall experience with Google Music has been kinda meh. I like their sharing functionality, but my first purchase was a pain in the butt….

I finally decided to buy a few albums during the big music sale G Music promoted during the holiday season. Unfortunately every time I'd check out it would prompt me to log in again. During this I noticed that at least some element of the process was using a different subdomain than the album page I was checking out from. Not sure if the login cookie just wasn't persisting across differing subdomains domains or my browser was set to block cookies set by third parties, but I vaguely remember having to manually whitelist the domain in Chrome's cookie exception manager to complete my purchase. It took a moment to figure out because there was no particular useful error - just the prompt to log in again.

I have no idea if I previously changed a setting in Chrome that resulted in this annoyance or if it was a default setting in Chrome, but that nearly prevented me from buying from Google's music service. There's no way someone like my Mom or sister would've figured that out. I hope they resolved that component assuming the problem wasn't limited to just my set up because at the time I thought it was rather silly that I wasn't able to easily purchase from a Google browser without modifying settings.

It's caused by the checkbox to deny third-party cookies, and it's on their known issues page.

http://support.google.com/androidmarket/bin/static.py?hl=en&...

Ahh, thanks for the heads up, thewordis. It's nice to know that they're aware of the problem.

@Title: Wonder why that is...

We're sorry. Google Music is currently only available in the United States.

One of the issues with Google Music, and this is something that I have seen increasingly over the past year or so, is that it seems that I can often roll my own, better solution to problems that these services claim to solve. In this specific case, running MPD into an Icecast stream means that I have remote access to my music library from anywhere, and using flacsync to make lossy copies of my FLAC files means that it's easy for me to manually manage the library on my MP3 player. All this without the pain of having to deal with the issues that this article talks about.

Obviously this setup is rather technical, and requires a nontrivial bit of setup work, but the fact that it is often easy to have ideas for substantial life improvements and then implement them well, with free software, has left me a bit disenchanted with the offerings from large, generally innovative companies like Google and Apple (a similar hack for streaming music to an AirPort Express from MPD can be had with the raop-play module for PulseAudio, for example).

I use it and it's the most used app of my smart phone.

It's just too buggy for me. I've had issues with the music manager not uploading new music, the Android app screwing up album sorting/track numbers, to long (5 minute+) delays in starting the streaming, tons of problems with artwork, etc. Nice idea but it just didn't seem to actually work very well for me. I've had much better results with Subsonic. It's not the same type of service as Google Music (you host the server on your own computer / connection) but it offers a lot of advantages. Pretty easy to install too. As long as you have a machine available 24x7 and a halfway decent Internet connection it works fantastically well.

Well this headline is really unfair.

I love Google Music, though not in a browser. It's a really great service once you run it in Nuvola Player (multimedia keys support, switching to Grooveshark and other services).

Too bad you have to "cheat" to register from Europe.

When they opened (hune/july last year) and it was invite-only (but everyone got like five of them right after registration) it worked fine. It was probably a mistake on their side but they didn't revoke the accounts.

Jesus, how great is Nuvola? Thanks for the awesome program of the day.

I love google music and I use it everyday. It's the most used app of my smart phone.

I wish they had a download option for all the music not just the music that I bought on google. That would help me to get rid of all the music on my computer.

They do. Just shift select all the songs that you want to download, click that little menu button and select "download all songs"

I can't tell if this article is serious or satire. Of course Google could hash your tracks locally before "reencoding" them (do they really re-encode tracks? I thought they only transcoded FLAC to MP3, but didn't touch MP3s). Of course, iTunes and Amazon tag/watermark your purchased tracks, even if there's no DRM. Lastly, of course people use Google Music. In fact, I use it so much and it's so well integrated into Android that I didn't even realize I didn't transfer any files to my new phone until I travelled to Brazil and was without data connection for half a day.

If you signed up early enough and bought an album (or something like that), Amazon gave out free unlimited storage for music. With that, there's no good reason to move to Google (20k song limit) - they have a perfectly good Android app, a decent web player, and they make it a snap to upload/download from your computer. I've tried Google music out and I agree - the software is really annoying.

It doesn't help that I already spent a month uploading my music to Amazon. I'm not going through that again anytime soon.

I signed up very early, but Amazon wouldn't let me buy an album from Amazon.com and wouldn't count albums from Amazon.de. Internet without borders, please..?

The fact of the matter is, there is absolutely no way Google could determine if your tracks were illegally downloaded or simply ripped from your own physical discs.

Well that's simply false. If I ripped a CD myself, it wouldn't be byte-for-byte identical as the copy on Pirate Bay. In fact, if I rip it myself and don't share that rip with anyone it should probably be unique within the system.

And how hard would it be to figure out who has illegal copies of an unreleased album?

Not true. If you ripped a CD using the same software and settings as someone else, your files would be identical, byte for byte. There is no magic fingerprinting, however, a lot of pirated tracks could be determined by looking at ID3 tag information since most warez crews like to brag about their releases.

That's simply not true when talking about audio CDs. You can even get non-identical rips from the same machine with the same CD-ROM drive, software and settings.

The issue is that the audio CD standard ("Red book") does not require block-accurate addressing during seeking[1]. This allows you to still be able to play scratched up CDs, with the trade off being that even discs that aren't scratched up that bad may not give you a byte-for-byte copy on different reads.

To try and account for this, CD ripping programs like EAC have to make multiple read passes and apply certain algorithms to determine where jitters occur and only take the "good parts."

[1]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jitter#Compact_disc_seek_jitter

I thought the point of Accurate Stream was to provide the ability to do sample-accurate streaming, along with C2 error detection to know when there was a problem. EAC only does multiple jittered read passes if your drive doesn't support Accurate Stream. How else can it do hash checks for accurate rips?

EDIT: I confused C2 error pointers and Accurate Stream. Mea culpa.

You're talking about read errors. Run a ripper that fixes/retries/etc the read errors, and you'll have an identical rip.

Would it not be possible for you to rip with super standard settings thus making it pretty much like every other rip?

I don't see how ripping could be so different if people use the same settings.

From what I understand--

The "lossy" part of MP3 is that the encoder decides to throw away frequency bands to reduce the information size.

This is more than just choosing a bitrate and being done with it - different encoders treat different bands as important or unimportant, attempting to make a smaller sized file still sound better.

Indeed but really, how many encoders does one use? That is, it's not like there are dozens of them that are widely used. If there are only 2 or 3 (say, LAME, some Apple one and some Microsoft one) and people usually use 2 or 3 bitrates... well that leaves quite the space for overlapping.

Right, but the music pirates don't write their own encoders. They are likely using software like LAME, EAC, and FLAC when ripping. Therefore, as long as someone uses the same settings, they could end up with an exact duplicate rip.

If two users were using a ripper that uses Accurate Rip, and both were using lossless compression, then you could end up with identical decompressed wav files.

Fair enough. There probably isn't a 100% perfect way of detecting unlicensed content in every case. But that wasn't the question. (The methods for detecting copyrighted content in YouTube videos are obviously quite far from 100% and yet they routinely ruin people's day.)

Yeah, like the guy who was uploading the birdsongs that got flagged as copyrighted.

Encoding software for most lossy formats rely on some form of prediction and realtime analysis. That can't be the same for every repeated encode. Some randomness has to appear so that bit for bit, separate encodes are not alike.

Why speculate when you can test?

   $ ls -l KDE_Startup_new.wav
   -rw-r--r-- 1 jerf jerf 970882 Feb 27 21:42 KDE_Startup_new.wav
   $ lame KDE_Startup_new.wav 1.mp3
   $ lame KDE_Startup_new.wav 2.mp3
   $ md5sum *mp3
   0bc5fee9b5d67ca2d6f1bf61a186067a  1.mp3
   0bc5fee9b5d67ca2d6f1bf61a186067a  2.mp3

Interesting. I know in x264 there's a non-deterministic option when using multithreading that can speed up encoding and quality sometimes, otherwise it always produces the same output.

Whether a format is lossy or not plays no part in whether the algorithm for transcoding is deterministic or not. The input (a CD) is digital and provided whole; there is no "realtime analysis" needed, and no reason why "prediction" would produce non-determinism.

Some multi-threaded encoders may be non-deterministic (from using concurrency), but encoding MP3s (or nearest equivalent) on modern hardware is generally fast enough for casual use even on a single thread, and parallelizing the operation would be better done at the level of tracks rather than within a track.

It's not quite "realtime analysis", but...

MP3 compression works by FFT-ing the audio stream, which is something that has to be ingested sequentially. It's not realtime since the encoder does it much faster than realtime, but it is doing sequential analysis of the file.

Usually a high quality encoder does multiple passes of the file to better fit it's FFT with the source material.

It works pretty well for me.

My feature wishlist:

  * iOS native app
  * nested playlists  
  * smart playlists 
  * playlist pictures 
  * playlist export 
  * gapless playback 
  * built-in scrobbling to last.fm 
  * volume control in android store 
  * music manager instant recognition

If I had it in the UK and they didn't convert flac and I would gladly pay. However, the don't and do.

Another link to page 2 of an article.

No. Because it's not available in my fucking country yet.

Why? I have a Subsonic server. It supports more formats, transcoding, (effectively) infinite storage. Open API for making mobile apps, etc.

(heh, my reply made more sense with the original title)

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