So as I mentioned at the tailing end of my last rant about rapidly changing platforms, Google has been working on their imaginatively titled “Google Music” platform for some time now, and they’ve now taken it out of beta and unleashed it upon the world. And by “the world”, I mean the USA. And by “taken it out of beta”, I mean they’ve taken the “beta” label off the web pages. Mostly.
The first issue here, that it is currently confined to the USA, just goes to show how little these new services are about solving technological problems, and are instead about solving licensing issues. Again it’s interesting the spectrum that is represented by these systems. Amazon launched first by completely ignoring the record companies, taking the position that it is merely acting as remote storage for a user’s files. Apple secured wide-ranging support from the record companies, even going so far as to secure a very customer-friendly feature in iTunes Match. Google’s offering lands somewhere in the middle, with limited (but surely growing) industry support, and an Amazon-style remote storage solution for users.
That’s the boring part of it all though. I hope Amazon sticks to their guns with their stance, because it makes a lot of sense to me. Media companies, music companies in particular, seem to have this weird sense of entitlement. Like when they took the position that Apple should be giving them money for each iPod, because it was “their product” that was making the iPod so popular. What an absurd stance.
(Aside: Not that I think a feature like iTunes Match could legally work in any customer-friendly way without industry support. But for simple remote storage of files users have already paid the record companies for? Fuck off with your double dipping, guys.)
What I actually wanted to note here was how average Google Music feels at the moment.
I installed the Music Manager app on my Mac, which adds a system preferences panel and an icon in the system tray. The purpose of this is to keep an eye on my iTunes library, uploading any songs not in my GM library. It looks decently configurable, though for some reason it refuses to transfer some of my non-protected M4A (AAC) files. There is a considerable setup period to start with where the music needs to be uploaded to Google’s servers. Not much Google can do about crappy upload speeds though.
The desktop web interface is not as good as iTunes, which is quite the anti-achievement. Simple options like playing a complete album are hidden behind mouse-over events or inside menus, depending upon where in the interface you are. As far as I can tell the player still requires Flash as well, or at least will complain if it isn’t present. I only point this out as an oddity because the mobile web app version plays music on my iOS devices where Flash is obviously not present. I’m curious what’s stopping them from using a similar solution where available.
The mobile web app is impressive in that it exists at all. Upon first launching it on my iPhone I was asked to allow Google Music to set up a larger database on my device. No problem there. And the interface is nice apart from some niggling issues. It adopts the Ice Cream Sandwich look, which seems to take a bit more from Windows Phone 7’s swiping panels than iOS’s hierarchical pages. It’s easy enough to navigate through the various lists of Albums, Artists, Playlists and the like.
The first problem is the inconsistent scrolling experience. Presumably in order to enable their swiping behaviour, the web app is overriding the default system scrolling. Therefore scrolling up or down varies depending on where the finger starts scrolling. Get it in the right spot, and the list will correctly scroll up and down. Get it in the wrong spot, and the entire page will scroll up and down. Not exactly ideal.
The web app also lacks some useful navigation. When I first used it there seemed to be no way to get back to the currently playing track without hunting it down in the lists again (this seems fixed now). It also seems like it relies too heavily on browser navigation buttons rather than providing its own, which is a problem if you’re doing what it seems like you should be doing, and adding Google Music as a web app on the iPhone’s homescreen. It becomes too easy to get stuck on a page with no way back.
Problems with poor and inconsistent layout aside, my last issue with the web app is that it doesn’t seem to update the library very often, if at all. I’ve read some reports of it taking about a week for the mobile web app to show new tracks. I didn’t wait that long, and had to delete the site’s database from my iPhone in order to update the library. Not particularly user friendly. I don’t know if this is an isolated issue or something Google have to work on to provide a better solution to.
It has problems. I’d rather be giving Apple US$25 and be using iTunes Match than putting up with these problems for free. It seems like a decent base to be building on though, and it goes a long way to making media management on Android devices not the issue it was before.
That’s it. I have no clever conclusion to recite.