Help Desk Geek – Help Desk Tips For IT Pros

There are any number of streaming music services available today, and a lot of them are very good.  There are free options, such as Pandora, and paid options such as MOG and Rdio (although both of those services do offer free options as well).  Not too long ago, Amazon added a web player to its offerings, and now any MP3 album you purchase through the Amazon MP3 Store shows up there.

And most recently, Google just took the beta label off its newest offering, called Google Music.  Google Music differs from all these other services, in that in addition to being attached to an online music service (like Amazon’s web player), Google Music users also have the option of uploading their current music collection for streaming.  Here’s how to get started.

First, head over to the Google Music home page.  If you aren’t logged into a Gmail account (assuming you have one), log into it now, or sign up for a free account.  Once logged in, you’ll see an interface that looks like this.

The difference is that if you’ve never used Google Music, you’ll see an empty playlist, with a couple of links to add music to your account.

We’ll go ahead and download the Google Music Manager (which is both an uploader to Google Music from our current music library as well as a downloader for any purchased music), so click that link.

In Linux, you’ll need to choose your distribution (or at least your package manager type).  There are installers available in .deb and .rpm format, for both 32-bit and 64-bit systems.

Once downloaded, simply install the Music Manager.  You can do this with your package manager, or as shown below, from the Terminal.

Now, launch the Google Music Manager.

After clicking through an introductory screen, you’ll need to login to your account.

Once signed in, you’ll want to tell the Google Music Manager where your music folder is.  You can use your standard “My Music” folder (in Windows), or your “Music” folder in Linux or Mac OS X, or point it at another folder (or folders) altogether.

Once you’ve done this, the Google Music Manager will scan your folder and show you how many songs are in your folder, as well as how much “space” you have left in your Google Music account.

Unlike every other similar service we’ve seen, Google Music doesn’t actually limit your account by hard drive space.  In other words, you don’t have a 5 GB limit to how much you can upload.  Instead, you’re allowed as much hard drive space as necessary to hold up to 20,000 songs.  That’s right, 20,000 songs.  For most people, this will be enough for their entire music library, which is pretty outstanding.

Once your music folder has been scanned, you’ll be asked if you want to have new music automatically uploaded or not.  If so, you’ll need to keep the Google Music Manager open, so it can tell when new music is added, and upload it immediately.  Otherwise, you can do this manually.

Once done, the Google Music Manager will start to upload your collection.  You’ll see a new icon in your indicator area, and you can access the Google Music Manager by double clicking it.

From here, you can initiate new uploads, add new music folder to your library, download music purchased from the Android Market, and set how high a priority the Music Manager should have while transferring files.

To download music, simply click the Download tab and click the Download Purchased Music button.  You’ll be asked where to save the downloaded music, and the Google Music Manager will then scan this space and download any music not downloaded since the last time you downloaded your purchased music.

As mentioned, Google Music is tied into the Android Market, so any album purchased there will automatically appear in your Google Music library.

What’s great is that with these type of purchases, you don’t need to download your music and then upload it.  Once purchased it goes straight to your library.

Of course, you may want your music purchase on your computer (for listening at home or to load on a portable player).  Your purchased music can actually be downloaded through the Google Music web interface, but only twice.  However, you can download it an unlimited number of times through the Google Music Manager.

And that’s it.  Google Music is a new service, but it seems really well thought-out and has a lot of great features.  In our use, there hasn’t been a time where the service buffered unnecessarily, even with high bitrates (the Android Market uses 320 kbps MP3 files), and the interface itself is quite nice.  The web player isn’t as powerful or feature-filled as a desktop player, but for a music player in a web browser, it – and Google Music in general – is outstanding.