Google Music Beta

It's been a few days since I got my invite, and I've had enough of a chance to make a general first impression of Google's Music Beta Service.

After receiving the invite while I was away on business, I promptly followed the instructions and downloaded the Music manager while at the hotel. After installation, it told me that I had > 1000 songs and began uploading them to the cloud. I left my laptop running overnight and voila, the upload was finished before I left for work in the morning. So far, great stuff. The UI is simple and easy to navigate (see pics below). I also downloaded the app for the phone and was promptly able to start streaming a playlist that I had created with no issues whatsoever. The UI on the phone app could be a bit more intuitive, but that's a matter of taste and space constraints. I'd also like to see the instant mix feature improved a bit. If you take a look at the picture below, you can kind of see the "odd" mix it created. Kudos for the feature. Hopefully it will improve as we move out of beta. Also, as an IE9 user, if they could make it more usable as a pinned page, it would be nice. Speaking of pinning, the ability to pin songs and make them available offline is definitely a welcome feature.

Upon returning home, I repeated the same process on my home PC. Here's where the service starts to earn it's "beta" tag. I repeated the same steps that I had taken for the laptop, and my library was uploaded in a few hours. The first thing that I noticed was that if there were duplicate songs on both machines, they were uploaded twice. In some cases, they loaded under the same album, but in some instances, a new album was created. This typically happens when there is a mismatch in the metadata, and can be easily corrected by editing the metadata. This isn't really the greatest user experience, but this is part of the problem when you use multiple methods to get content on to your machines as opposed to a single method like iTunes. I had ripped older CD's using Windows Media Player, newer content was purchased and managed through Rhapsody. Also, what I noticed, was that my older content had been ripped at such a low bit rate, that it was almost un-listenable. Most of this content was purchased when my media player was a 512MB Creative USB media Player stick. What a long way we've come!

When I re-ripped all of my older content at 320kb/s (Google plays at a max bit rate of 320 kb/s), the Music Manager re-imported all of these songs. After severl hours of "cleaning up" my content on the machines, in Rhapsody, and in Music Beta, I've been trouble free ever since. Again,I don't truly think this is a Google issue. This would have been a much smoother experience is I had been a better organized keeper of my content. I probably should have done this clean-up when I purchased my desktop.

That being said, they could probably provide tools to help improve the experience, since this is supposed to create a single repository for your content. Maybe when we come out of Beta? The biggest issue I see is that they have no way to purchase new content. That is a MAJOR roadblock on the path to becoming a mainstream service. Only time will tell if they can move past that hurdle. Maybe Google Music "Powered by Rhapsody"? I can dream can't I?

Overall, I like the service, but it's inability to purhase new content from within the service is really holding it back. I'll be following as it evolves.

• Set-up: B
• Interface: B+
• Overall: C