Google Music: Fast syncing, free songs

Google

Screenshot of recently played music, using album art, on Google Music

By Athima Chansanchai

With the unveiling of its new online music store Wednesday, Google upped the ante in its ongoing battle against Apple and Amazon's cloud-based music services, but it still has some minor kinks that prevent it from that instant wow factor.

For instance, I've been using on Music Beta by Google for awhile now, which was previously only available by invitation starting this past summer. It's been decent, especially in being able to sync between the desktop player and the Music app on my Android phone. There was also a lot of free music, although much of it was so-so, but some stood out: "Champagne supernova" by Oasis, "Brick" by Ben Folds Five and "Gravity rides everything" by Modest Mouse.

In its newest iteration, Google Music offered some new free music, which I grabbed immediately: "I don't want to know," by The Swell Season. While it showed up immediately in the desktop version, I waited for about a half hour for it to show up on my phone, and only after I had downloaded the 4.0.9 update that came out yesterday.?

Google

The checkout screen of Google Music, once you've added a song

I'm guessing the lag time can be attributed to having to install the newest version and processing that, because?once installed, subsequent additions kicked in super fast. I "bought" the free song, "Palomino" by Mates of State and within a minute later, it was on my phone. Hubba, hubba! I could get used to this. Now, I can see the wow.

Here's Google's intro to its Music app, which you can find on Android Market for free:

Another perk for friends: if you share the purchase?? or in my case, the free additions?? then anyone you share it with on Google+ will be able to listen to it for free too, once.?

Live Poll

What cloud-based service do you use to listen to music?

• 168251

  Google Music works for me.

  40%

• 168252

  The Amazon cloud player is cloud nine for me.

  18%

• 168253

  I swear by iTunes in the iCloud.

  42%

VoteTotal Votes: 127

I also took advantage of another Google Music feature: pinning favorites amongst my phone library of music for offline playback. (It got annoying when it only let me play music I bought and not any of the freebies.)?

Google Music also allows users to upload 20,000 of their own songs to it. I haven't added that many yet, but it won't take long to do so. Or, buy music on Android Market. It'll show up in the Google Music app, both on your desktop and phone(s).

Take our poll and let us know what you're using to listen to your music.

Two Internet giants now offer bring-your-own-tunes music services, which let you stream your own MP3s to PC, phones and tablets. How do they differ? And who else is joining the fray?

More stories:

Check out Technolog on?Facebook, and on Twitter, follow?Athima Chansanchai, who is also trying to keep her head above water in the?Google+?stream.

Source: http://technolog.msnbc.msn.com/_news/2011/11/17/8857133-google-music-fast-syncing-free-songs

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