2013 is the year that my mom (who still has a flip phone and turns it off when she has completed a call) has purchased an iPod. This has proven to me the the iPod’s time of relevance has come to pass. I have used the “mom” rule successfully many times before when it comes to electronics.
I have been interested in “cloud” music for a while. I like the idea that if I ever need to hear “Baby Snakes” or “Girls With Guns” that all I have to do is log onto any computer (not even my own) and I can access MY copy of this song and play it instantly.
I am an iPhone owner, so I only just discovered the Android Market aka Google Play and the Google Play music storage feature.
You can upload 20,000 songs (not a misprint) for free and access them from the homepage of Google or gmail.
I narrowed my digital collection to 20,000 (was 4,000 over) and could not use DRM-protected iTunes files (protected .aac). I think that was maybe 30 songs. It would not accept .wav files either, but you can make them into mp3s and they work.
MOST of the files are not uploaded, they are just “recognized” by Google Play and they match it with their copy. If they can’t match it, THEN they upload it.
You can stream from ANY Android phone or tablet and from any computer, but not iphone or other devices that do not use flash.
You can burn my house down. but you can’t take my music collection!
The Instant Mix feature is pretty decent (unlike iTunes’ Genius which was pretty bad). It makes mixes based on a single song or LP. Kind of like Pandora w/o commercials and ONLY using your music.
I am so impressed by this program and it’s potential to use with BluTooth to shove my music down everyone’s throats.
I still like records more. But I like everything that’s not iTunes because I’ve got big hangups about that company. The cloud stuff looks interesting, but it’s odd that the labels aren’t demanding Google store individual files. Seems kinda like the honor system, and that doesn’t work too well on the internet. Being able to access your entire collection anywhere sounds like something radio will never be able to compete with. Which is probably a good thing. Radio deserves everything they’re getting.
I’ve been receiving e-mails encouraging me to get into this Google Play thing, the cloud, and other new horizons I don’t understand. Thanks for spelling out some of what this means. I’ll have to look into it a little more closely. My gut reaction to all this is to react against what I perceive as corporations trying to co-opt my taste in music for their efforts to more precisely target me as a consumer. I also react to these corporations fighting over the rights to mimic my record collection on their servers. Why should Apple, for instance, not allow its stuff to go on someone else’s cloud? Technology offers so much these days, but it seems we quickly narrow our options instead by fighting over who owns what cloud. So far, I’ve yet to get on anyone else’s cloud.
So…on a related note…can anyone tell me why I’m (quite) suddenly receiving an email per day from a company called “Paste,” urging me to subscribe?
This looks like another cloud service, but I must confess to not knowing the details despite receiving their emails repeatedly.
You see…my distaste for their method of communicating with me has made it difficult for me to want to read them.
Paste is a magazine. Kind of like Entertainment Weekly, I think. I suspect that someone you do business with sold them your email address without your consent. Or you forgot to uncheck a box about ‘sharing’ your email address.
I subscribed to the print edition for awhile — it was aimed at an older crowd who still wanted to listen to new music. I thought it was online only now. They did music sampler CDs from time to time as I recall.
Thanks for responding, you two!
BigSteve (I haven’t forgotten about my digital promise, btw), I was pretty sure they got my email address in the manner you’ve described. I was more curious as to what, exactly, their business with me was.
So I went back and read one of the emails I’m complaining about.
If I subscribe to Paste online (there you have it, funoka), they give me “7 free songs per week” in the Paste Sampler.
So this may or may not have anything to do with big fluffy clouds of rock.
There’s no indication as to whether or not I get to *have* them and use them on any platform, or if they’re on the Paste Player, or something like that.
So I may have simply stepped into a thread with completely irrelevant comments.
Sorry, jungle.
I really don’t know clouds at all.
Paste is a pretty decent mag based out of Atlanta . They have struggled with making money the last few years
Google cloud did not block apple purchases. Apple at first blocked their own content from being shared. Just their early itunes stuff. I think by 2005 or 6 this was removed – digital rights management was the buzz phrase.
Google play has become my music system replacing ipod and cds after just one week of using it. I’m in a restaurant right now and can access my entire 20,000 songs on my nook tablet
Well it ticked me off all over again — because now I remember when the print edition went belly up they still owed me six issues. Bastardos!