Carl Hage

So a few weeks ago I signed up for the  Google Music beta, and finally got an invite. I have put up some screen shots for all to see! So it all started with an email…

I am using a Mac, so I got a .dmg installer. After a very quick and easy install step, the Google Music Manager shows up in my System Preferences Pane, when I open it, it shows something like this.

You can either select your iTunes library or give it your default Music folder or specify which folders to look through. There are advanced settings that let you throttle upload speed, and the frequency of  synchronization etc. I found that when I have it on unlimited speed it tended to eat up my upload bandwidth.

To be honest, I found the uploads a little on the slow side, despite the fact that it ate up my bandwith, it seemed to take forever to upload songs, and if you’re like me you’ve got a rather large music collection you want to upload (here I’m just giving it a part of my music that I listen to most frequently). Finally comes the player:

The music player opens exclusively in your browser, there is no application on the desktop for it, but I guess that is kind of the point of all this. It’s very fast, smooth, easy as hell to use. It also has no advertising (ala Grooveshark), however it seems that Google Music is not going to be free forever, it stated that this is a limited free beta, so eventually I am going to have to pay to stream my music. Another positive thing is that its not using any flash, it’s all pure HTML5 and CSS based, meaning that iPhones and Blackberry phones can open this via their browsers and stream too! They do of course offer an Android app which I have not tried.

So overall, it’s looking like a great product for it being in a beta stage, the design in terms of the diagonal lines etc, I’m not too fond it, I do believe at one point you will be able to sort of customize it like Gmail etc. Hope you enjoyed the screenshots, let me know your thoughts in the comments below.