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Google music

Yup, I've been using it for a few months. Google Music doesn't have an official iOS app but there are a handful of them that have been made to work with it, I'm using Melodies. It's pretty nice, and better that it's free.
 
I don't envision ever playing my music in the cloud. But I already have Google's music manager software. So part of me says "why not?". Looks like it'd be pretty easy.

(Though the tinfoil hat wearer in me says not to do it.)
 
This saved me $150. I was going to buy something like a Western Digital MyBook Live hard drive.

I'm loving it so far. I uploaded about 7,000 songs so far and I have another 2,500 that I have to convert to mp3 first because Apple Lossless is not supported.
 
I took the plunge and uploaded my stuff.

Took a couple of days of constant uploading before it finished, but now I've essentially got a 3rd backup of my music. Granted, it's not the same as my other backups which have lossless; but it's better than being left with nothing if worst came to worst.

Anyway...

I'm still not a big on the idea of the cloud as a replacement for on-board storage. My phone/mp3 player is always going to have to have at least 32gb of internal storage (preferably more). But I can definitely see the cloud as something that I could use to supplement the internal storage. (Or to use the cloud on a secondary device like a tablet, where music wouldn't be a priority to me.)

That said...

I am a little disappointed in Google's own "Play Music" app that I must use to stream my tunes from the cloud.

It's a little disorganized, and---on my phone---maybe a little bit slow. It doesn't sound quite as good as PowerAmp, even after installing some 3rd party equalizers. But my biggest gripe is that (at least on my phone) for some reason the "Play Music" app will stop playing music after a couple of minutes once the screen backlight turns off. I've read a couple of comments where some other folks have had that issue, but it isn't everybody; so that is obviously phone dependent. So that sucks. Right now the only way I can keep the app from shutting down after the backlight turns off is by plugging the powercord into the phone and charging it. Weird, I know... but my Pandora app is the exact same way. Oh, well... at least I can hope that my next phone, or maybe a future cheap tablet might work with this app properly.
 
I've switched to a Galaxy S3 from the iPhone and the Google Play app I'm using is far better than the Melodies app on my iPhone. I've yet to have any skips, dropped songs or other small bugs I was experiencing. Using the widget is super fast too. Now when I get into my car I can quick swipe down, press Bluetooth and swipe over to the widget and poof, music! iPhone I had to go to settings, connect to Bluetooth and wait for the app....I've gone form a minute to mere seconds.

I love this service. It works wonderfully, good sound quality and free!!
 
That's good to hear that it rocks on your new S3. Gives me hope. Not that I plan on getting a new phone for at least another year.

Question: Do you have this following glitch? Or is it just me?

One of the things that bothers me slightly is that on my phone... when I'm flipping through the "artist" section... and when I select, for instance, Al Green... among his albums I have the choice of Al Green's "Greatest Hits", of course. But for some strange reason I also have all of the songs from ANYBODY ELSE'S album if it happens to be called "Greatest Hits". So under Al Green I also have songs from Shania Twain, The Bangles, The Band, etc. etc. etc. Basically anybody who has an album entitled "Greatest Hits".

The confusing thing is that this only happens on the phone. Not when I visit the Play website on my computer.
 
UPDATE: I've found a solution to my problem regarding "Greatest Hits' albums. And I'm posting it here mostly just as a note to myself because I'm guessing I'll probably forget what I did to fix the problem in the first place. Anyway here goes...

1. My iTunes rips mostly didn't have anything put into the "Album Artist" field for the ID3 tags.

2. So using the computer web browser I needed to go into Google's Cloud Player and select each affected song/album and update the ID3 tag in the cloud. (Shift/highlight to select all tracks and right click for 'edit' options works fine.)

So now it works fine for all "Greatest Hits", "The Collection", "The Ultimate Collection", "20 Greatest Hits", etc type of albums that are frequently used by multiple bands. A couple of glitches still remain as I've got a few songs that are duplicated on my phone (between the cloud and on-board microSD storage) because the cloud no longer recognizes some tracks that I had built into the phone's microSD storage as being the exact same song. Though not on all changed tracks... just a few oddballs for some reason. Oh, well... This is much better than it was before. I just wish that iTunes would've included the "Album Artist" info from the get go. Or else wish that Google Play's cloud app would've worked like my PowerAmp music app which mostly doesn't care about "Album Artist" tag info for my practical purposes.
 
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