Google Music Goes Live With Google+ Integration 240
angry tapir writes "Google Music, the company's cloud-based online music service, is now available to all users in the US and includes song and album sales, as well as an integration with the Google+ social networking site. Introduced in test form and by invitation only in May as a cloud-based song storage and playback service, Google Music will also let users buy albums and songs from all major music labels, except Warner."
Just what market needed... (Score:4, Interesting)
The collection is impressive, as is the freedom (yes, it will also work with iOS devices), along with integration with Android.
I have two sources for digital music - Amazon mp3 and now Google Music (not counting other channels). More choices, more competition.
And good to see a better alternative to itunes (yuk!).
(Now get on with your Google hate - that's the flavor of the month here on slashdot these days)
Re:Just what market needed... (Score:4, Informative)
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Spotify doesnt have everything i have in my collection. Spotify also requires software be installed, gmusic is browser based which makes it more workplace friendly for me.
Re:Just what market needed... (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Just what market needed... (Score:5, Interesting)
Your entire collection of music available, browser based (no installation needed), no ads, unlimited streaming, mobile access on android and iphone with offline listening, and it's FREE!
Umm, didn't you already have the ability to sync your music files to your phone? How many gigs of music do you really need to carry around? How much is just packrat/hoarding mentality? ("omg, what if I want to listen to my Englebert Humperdinck albums while taking a long walk alone on the beach, even though I live in Wyoming?") If you're a luddite and have an iPod instead of an Android phone, is there any benefit at all to letting Google scan your hard drive?
Google Music requires me to install a program that scans my hard drive looking for music, and it seems to keep a list online somewhere of the music I have. Is this not asking for trouble? Is this not asking for abuse by the RIAA's goon squads? Is this not going to open the door at least to the possibility of a major abuse of privacy with legal and financial implications? "Don't be Evil" isn't reassuring enough for that kind of risk, especially when the only benefit from the risk is the convenience of sharing music with an Android phone (which I don't have).
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Umm, didn't you already have the ability to sync your music files to your phone? How many gigs of music do you really need to carry around? How much is just packrat/hoarding mentality?
At any one time, I might only want a few songs from my collection. The thing is that list will change from day to day. Now with Google Music on my Xoom, my cellphone and my desktop, I don't have to worry about the hassle of "syncing" between them all. It just works.
Google Music requires me to install a program that scans my hard drive looking for music, and it seems to keep a list online somewhere of the music I have. Is this not asking for trouble?
Are you going for the Glenn Beck rhetorical question award? He probably has that patented you know. Good thing you logged in AC.
the only benefit from the risk is the convenience of sharing music with an Android phone
And your tablet, and your pc, and your tv if you have more than a cable box attached to it. It also syncs with a
Re:Just what market needed... (Score:5, Insightful)
Why are you so against this? It seems like the logical conclusion of my data being every I want it to be without me having to worry about it.
Because:
a) there's an army of barbarian lawyers at the gates screaming that it's not my data;
b) the logical conclusion of my data being where I want it to be doesn't need to include Google or anyone else having a copy of my data: while that's a possible conclusion, it's not the only possible conclusion, but rather one that guarantees a loss of privacy;
c) it's linked to all of Google's other information about me, and this is being compiled at a time when Google is expressly attempting to build identity verification into their services.
Re:Just what market needed... (Score:5, Insightful)
Yeah, just like those silly paranoid students that thought their universities might release their personal info in response to RIAA/MPAA demands -- oh wait...
Seriously, consider it this way:
1. Google wants people's real-life name, cellphone number, in some cases they've demanded a driver's license or state ID; they freely hand over information when any government agency in the US (and many other countries) requests
2. The RIAA has a reputation for going overboard in identifying, harassing & prosecuting anyone that may have downloaded illicit copies of songs, not particularly caring that they've repeatedly been caught targeting obviously innocent people
3. Our government currently favors the "rights" or well-being of corporations far more than citizens (innocent or not)
So when Google offers to host personal libraries bound to hold plenty of files (some of which are illegally downloaded or could only be obtained by illegally circumventing DRM), you figure the RIAA won't take advantage of it, Google won't hand the named member's personal info over, and the government won't play along? You should revise your signature, most people with a real cognitive impairment would know better...
Re:Just what market needed... (Score:4, Insightful)
I mostly have FLAC music, and transcoding every time I sync to my phone is a pain. Figuring 500MB per album, I can only fit so and so much on a 32GB memory card (about 16GB of which is filled with other junk anyway)... and then when the mood strikes, the album I'd like to listen to usually isn't on my SD card. Google Music or Subsonic are great for those situations...
FLAC that... (Score:2)
yeah, very glad to see Google Music accept FLAC uploads.
I have a non-smart phone where the contents of the memory card are accessible as a regular drive when connected to a PC. Easy to manage, yay.
I only have to do FLAC-->MP3 when I'm putting something on there the first time.
My phone doesn't read FLAC, wouldn't want to use it anyway due to space limitations (16 GB card, mostly music). even switched from 320 to 256 in order to save space.
kept the FLAC versions on my PC hard drive, and play those when I'm
Re:Just what market needed... (Score:5, Informative)
Assuming you have some space on your computer to store the transcoded files, I wrote a Makefile to transcode music to solve this. I can't access it right now, but I use a very similar Makefile for keeping all my photographs (at low resolution) on the phone, which is really useful for annoying people with holiday snapshots. I just changed it to work with music files.
~/.toPhone/Source/ (symlink to my photos)
~/.toPhone/Albums/ (this is rsynced to my phone with rsync for Android [android.com])
~/.toPhone/Makefile
PHOTOS = $(shell find -L Source/ -type f -name '*.jpg')
SHRUNK = $(patsubst Source/%.jpg, Albums/%.jpg, $(PHOTOS))
PNGS = $(shell find -L Source/ -type f -name '*.png') .PHONY: all
SHRPNG = $(patsubst Source/%.png, Albums/%.jpeg, $(PNGS))
all: $(SHRUNK) $(SHRPNG)
Albums/%.jpg: Source/%.jpg
@mkdir -p "$(@D)"
convert "$<" -resize '800x800>' -quality 40 "$@"
@touch -r "$<" "$@"
Albums/%.jpeg: Source/%.png
@mkdir -p "$(@D)"
convert "$<" -resize '800x800>' -quality 40 "$@"
@touch -r "$<" "$@"
Then it's just:
nice -n 20 make -j 4
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Looks great!
The issue isn't space on my machine for additional lossy versions, but rather a system for keeping it all organized :(
Using Subsonic or Winamp to transcode on demand seems easier because that way I don't need any duplicates... and transcoding on the fly for streaming is even easier ;)
Re:Just what market needed... (Score:4, Funny)
If you're a luddite and have an iPod instead of an Android phone
... that word. I do not think it means what you think it means.
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As long as your music collection is really small
You can fill your Google Music with 20,000 tracks. That is not "really small" by 99.999 percent of people's definition. I don't think that will be a problem. People on Slashdot trolling? That's still a problem.
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Well, I do have more than 20.000 tracks in my collection.
But I need to clean that collection up anyway.
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Re:Just what market needed... (Score:5, Informative)
Because spotify costs money (I either have to pay a monthly fee, or I have to buy a copy of windows or a mac or so). They say [spotify.com] this is because they haven't figured out how to display ads on linux yet. Oh and you can't store music locally on linux. This doesn't doesn't sound like the type of software I'm psyched to pay for. Oh even though I might be paying for a "premium" account. It would be unsupported...
Re:Just what market needed... (Score:5, Funny)
You should register with the Pirate Bay. They offer free accounts, no bandwidth limit restrictions, no geolocation restrictions, they have a wide variety of musical genres and selections to choose from and you can even download music from Warner Brothers, no questions asked and no premium service fees required. And best of all, none of the multimillionaire executives of the RIAA are getting rich off of this service.
Register today for the best Internet based music service in the industry:
https://thepiratebay.org/register [thepiratebay.org]
Re:Just what market needed... (Score:5, Informative)
Google Music doesn't even work outside US, which is incredibly stupid as it is your own collection of music, not some streaming service.
I'm German, living in Germany and guess what?
I have Google Music on my Android phone... AND IT IS WORKING!!!
The web interface too.
Sure, I probably can not buy music via Google Music, but I don't need to. There are enough channels to get my music from.
Oh, and Spotify isn't available everywhere as well. And you seem to need a Facebook account, which I don't have nor want.
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"..doesn't even work outside US" for small values of doesn't work, i.e. Google says it doesn't, makes it non-obvious how to setup outside the US (i.e. you cannot download from the app-store) but it works just fine thank you ...
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Are you able to add your mp3's from Amazon and Google to your central storage machine and play them from any device at any time? I ask because if I can't add music to my streaming server I don't buy it.
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Amazon MP3 used to be a download-once deal, IIRC, but since they've launched their "Cloud Player" thingy, they seem to be having unlimited re-downloads.
Re:Just what market needed... (Score:5, Funny)
Now get on with your Google hate - that's the flavor of the month here on slashdot these days
Wait. What?
Seriously?
What Slashdot are you reading?...
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The one where online privacy and intellectual property rights are the most important issues.
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seems like early kinks to me (Score:2)
seems like early kinks to me
for me, it missed a few .m4a's and accepted a few .mp3's and .flac's that the player refused to play
other songs from those albums (i.e. same rip/same file format/same tagging) went through just fine
the album art was a more consistent issue. However, I tend to put one copy of the cover in the same folder and link to it, rather than embed in
US Only :-( (Score:5, Insightful)
*Sigh*. Yet another fantastic music service not available in my country.
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Re:US Only :-( (Score:4, Insightful)
It's almost as if Google is a U.S. company or something.
What about the rest of us?
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bittorrent
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Listening to Google Music on my UK Bought, UK registered, Android phone ... Not as US centric as Google want ... or maybe they don't care ...
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Really? I thought it was Chinese. Isn't that why they spelled Googol wrong?
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*whooosh*
Re:US Only :-( (Score:5, Insightful)
Don't feel so bad when it comes to Canada it'll be stalled by beurocracy and the telcos then they'll cry that its unfair to them since its a foreign company moving in. Then they'll just drop the data caps for intternet packages even lower.
Re:US Only :-( (Score:5, Interesting)
Let's be clear here. Google has introduced features higgledy-piggledy into Canada, and presumably the rest of the world. Can I hide search results in Canada? No. But I _do_ have to suffer through "auto-complete" and site preview on their search engine. Giving us half of the features is worse than none at all, because it makes things slower without making them better.
But hey - Google doesn't give a shit, because they're working towards two goals: Market domination and stock price.
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Yeah, but understandably, to fulfil the legal requirement of a country, in particular for music and video, is probably more complex than many of us think.
Re:US Only :-( (Score:4, Interesting)
Proxies and VPNs are a pain in the arse to use, and I certainly don't want to be buying music only to lose access to it because Google closes the loophole. (It's like a game of whackamole sometimes, as many services will block known proxies and VPNs to stop this happening).
I presume once it's out of Beta they'll work at bringing it to other countries, so here's hoping it eventually makes it to Australia.
Re:US Only :-( (Score:5, Informative)
I'm in Australia, but access the internet at work via US servers. Just tried to buy music through Google Music - but it requires a US credit card. My Australian and UK credit cards didn't work.....
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only to lose access to it because Google closes the loophole
The songs are standard MP3, no DRM, so whatever you buy (and download) you keep, loophole or no.
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True - but I can do that now through dozens of different music stores available in my country without VPN hacks and fake billing addresses.
The selling point for Google Music is the 'Cloud Storage' - I can redownload whenever I like, and access on any device. Without that feature, I might as well just stick with existing stores.
Oh I see (Score:3)
That's why they finally rolled out + access to those of us that use Google Apps, they were about to launch a service requiring money!
Re:Oh I see (Score:5, Informative)
Still US only (Score:2, Insightful)
Gee, that's nice (Score:5, Interesting)
Google Music will also let users buy albums and songs from all major music labels, except Warner.
Will they let users buy albums and songs from other Google+ users who record their own albums and songs?
Re:Gee, that's nice (Score:5, Informative)
Yes, in fact they will. Artists can upload their own music and sell it.
Only in the U.S. (Score:5, Insightful)
Last I checked, pirating music was way easier than buying it legitimately and no one cares which country you are in. Could the music industry, just perhaps, stop being a joke?
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Hear Hear. When will the music industry wake up?
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Never? I'm sure the masses of kids these days have figured out the same thing. Pirating is easier than buying it, especially when it's free. Well there goes another generation.
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Last I checked, pirating music was way easier than buying it legitimately and no one cares which country you are in. Could the music industry, just perhaps, stop being a joke?
Don't worry, you're doing your level best to put them out of business. Hard to be a joke when you're out on the streets. FYI, the big bad old "music industry" is actually made up of a tiny handful of rich fatcats and an enormous number of passionate amateur musicians in their early 20s who wanted a job that got them closer to their passion in any way possible. Forget about the guys at the top...it's the hordes of young adults with stars in their eyes who suffer most from piracy.
Of course, no-one on Slashdot
Re:Only in the U.S. (Score:5, Insightful)
Forget about the guys at the top...it's the hordes of young adults with stars in their eyes who suffer most from piracy.
That's like saying the people who suffer the most from abolishing sweatshops are the sweatshop workers. It's also a load of crap.
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...it's the hordes of young adults with stars in their eyes who suffer most from piracy.
Actually, artists make almost all of their money on concerts and tangible non-musical items like t-shirts, because the music publishing industry takes such a large cut of each sale. Source: http://bit.ly/DigitalRoyalty [bit.ly] -- which doesn't mention that before they get any return on sales at all, artists have to sell enough to cover whatever advance they were given & costs they owe.
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Tell those struggling amateur musicians that do not have a record deal, that "Shock horror" they don't need one .... ...Go get a PR company to promote your music on iTunes, and Amazon, and arrange and advertise concerts, and the record company can make those curious black and shiny wheel shaped things that no-one buys anymore
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For the US people, however, buying music from Google Music and then streaming it is easier than downloading it somewhere else, uploading it to Google Music and then streaming it...
Only applies if you want to use Google Music whether or not you buy the music there, of course, but there is a certain convenience factor that's undeniable.
Fucked again (Score:5, Interesting)
Spotify, Amazon mp3, Google music; all not available in Australia. iTunes charging so much that it's usually cheaper to buy the physical CD from America and have it shipped across the friggin' ocean. Well, at least there's Grooveshark ... until SOPA closes it down.
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I don't know what Google Music is charging. The point is that buying from iTunes in America is apparently much cheaper than buying from iTunes in Australia (even when our dollar is stronger). This is because there is absolutely no competition here in the downloadable music space. They only have to set their prices to compete with domestic CD retailers.
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What's with all the music services lately? (Score:3)
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With iTMS, you can buy and then immediately download and listen to music on your iPhone / iPad. Google wants the same kind of thing for their Android, so that you don't have to manually sync files and playlists and whatnot.
Good grief (Score:5, Funny)
This whole thread seems like "Super Smash Bros., Cloud Music Edition".
Google Fanbois versus Apple Fanbois.... FIGHT!
The way they'll kill the dinosaurs (Score:5, Interesting)
A lot of people have missed one of the most important things about this announcement. Indie musicians, without a label, can sign up, sell their music, and keep 70% of the sales revenue.
For years, we've bemoaned the RIAA and the giant labels for screwing artists out of their fair share. They're parasites controlling the distribution channels and deciding what pop-artist of the year they'll be pushing down our throats. Artists are lucky to get into the double digit percentage of sales revenue for their music, instead of pennies for a $20 disk.
If a talented indie artist or band can put their music on Google Music and get comparable exposure to the artists pushed and promoted by the large labels, it will drastically change the dynamics of the artist/label relationship. Evaluation of music by merit instead of marketing might. There will be a viable way to make a living without signing over one's soul and rights to a label.
This cuts out the traditional middle men in the music production process, and that's what terrifies the RIAA.
Google has the money to buy out the major labels, but instead of doing that, they made a very shrewd strategic decision to instead use the advances in technology to democratize music distribution. That's big, and that shouldn't be underestimated.
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Apple also takes %30, but they don't have a system for indie musicians.
Re:The way they'll kill the dinosaurs (Score:5, Informative)
article states:
http://www.garagespin.com/2009/03/09/7-ways-sell-your-music-on-itunes/
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I think the point is that with the Google offering you get a huge installed base, and great integration with the software and devices people are already using.
It's the same benefit that integrated app stores had for indie developers.
I'd never heard of Indietorrent or Bandcamp before. Granted, I don't look for much new music these days, but I guess that makes me a good representative of your average music listener.
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Say I discovered a great indie band and I wanted to share with a technically challenged friend: with Indietorrent I'd have to explain to him how torrents work, have him install a torrent client, get him to download the music and add it to wherever he stores it.
With services like Google Music and iTunes, the user can stream a sample directly and if he likes it, simply press the buy button and everything's taken care of for him.
This is not to mention the fact that your music is in the same place as recognized
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No. You obviously haven't looked at how it works.
I hadn't. Thanks for the correction.
Do they have lossless formats? (Score:5, Insightful)
Here's what one music professional said (Score:3)
"well, sadly i'm currently 280 songs over the 20k limit for Google Music. i feel like i first did way back when i realized it wouldn't all fit on my 64GB iPod. something about the completionist/archivist in me just doesn't want to bother uploading anything if i can't have it all."
This is a quote from a person who has his own successful band and who also designs and builds websites for bands more successful than his, using Drupal. Most of them are so done up you can't detect the Drupal in them. You've heard of the bands whose sites he does, but if I told you, that would be outing.
I'd love to dump on this idea, but... (Score:3)
Comment removed (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Copy-and-Paste (Score:5, Interesting)
Have YOU used iTunes lately? (Score:5, Informative)
iTunes requires a horribly bloated app installed on your computer and clunky syncing of music between said computer and your iOS device.
No, currently you download music anywhere and all your devices have access to that music at once, wherever they are... you see all the playlists from any device, if a song is not stored locally then you can simply ask to download it.
Some of that is made better with Match, since it will upload and store for you songs not in iTunes.
I'm not sure Google's music offering could really be more pleasant to use than this... It's great that they have this as an alternative but they are just basically barley keeping up with Apple at this point. Do they even have the same deal where they will make any of your ripped songs available over the cloud also?
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No, currently you download music anywhere and all your devices have access to that music at once, wherever they are... you see all the playlists from any device, if a song is not stored locally then you can simply ask to download it.
I haven't used the service you're speaking of so I have a couple of questions. Do you have to download the song then listen or does it start streaming as soon as you click it like Google Music? Also, does this service cost money or is it free like Google Music?
Either way (Score:3)
Do you have to download the song then listen or does it start streaming as soon as you click it like Google Music?
You can do either - if you just click on it, it will start playing. Or there is also a "cloud" icon for any song not on the device, that you can opt to download it to your device and have it for times you don't have network access.
If you swipe to delete a song from the device then it gets deleted locally and returns the song to "cloud" status.
Also, does this service cost money or is it free lik
Well that made no sense (Score:2)
But three of my friends recently lost all their music, thanks to iTunes.
The whole point of the new iTunes/iCloud integration is that you cannot lose you music. Any music you bought from iTunes can be downloaded from iTunes on any computer, or any iOS device logged into the iCloud account.
Even your own music is similarly saved if you buy Match, it uploads what is not on iTunes to iCloud, and you can access it from any computer/device logged into your iCloud account.
Re:Copy-and-Paste (Score:4, Informative)
iTunes requires a horribly bloated app installed on your computer and clunky syncing of music between said computer and your iOS device.
Google music needs none of this (with the exception of a small app to upload your music you already have to the cloud).
It's not really a comparison you can make. iTunes does more than upload music into the cloud so I'm not sure how you arrived at "bloated". I'd list everything it could do but I'd sound like a cheerleader and I'm not sure it would make a difference. I'll just leave it at it's a dessert topping and a floor wax.
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Sure, it does a lot more, but if you don't want those features then *to you* they're just bloat.
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Perhaps it's not a fair comparison, but I agree that iTunes is terrible. I would suspect that the "bloated" allegation came about because it's a bit like Microsoft Word - it could be a simple, fast, easy to use word processor, but it has thousands of features when most people only ever use a very small subset of core functionality.
Same with iTunes. My main complaints are that it's slow as molasses, and is horribly clunky. In contrast to the "it just works" philosophy, iTunes doesn't. Example: our devices ha
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Please explain why you assume it must require Flash? Baseless assumptions.
The audio format is mp3 @ 320kbps. Wrong again.
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The audio format is mp3 @ 320kbps
Ah great. So that's a poor codec, yet huge files. In other words: worst of both worlds. Well done, Google. I really want to pay for this now!
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Sure it sounds fine and indistinguishable from anything else.
Thank you, you finally answered my question.
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If it's quality you're after, why don't go lossless and enjoy perfect quality?
Of course you or I would do that but this is Google and they have to take their infrastructure and number of users into consideration. I can see why they would rather go with lossy rather than lossless when storing other people's content.
Yet if it's efficient use of bandwith you're after, why not use a codec that actually manages to get the best sounding music in the least amount of bits?
The advantages of aac over mp3 are marked at low bit rates but we are talking about 320 not 128 and at high bitrates, as you've mentioned, you're not going to be able to tell the difference so Google must have taken other things into consideration when choosing their codec
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I really doubt AAC or OGG at 224 or 256 would sound worse than MP3 at 320. But you're probably right, the reason for Google to pick this format is likely because of something else entirely.
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Probably portability. MP3 works in most any player whereas AAC doesn't.
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Maybe you have your songs where ever *you* are but I can guarantee you that it won't work worth shit if you were out on my bike trail
I guarantee you it will work worth much more than "shit" (what's the fascination with feces?) on your bike trail since it is trivial to pin songs onto your device.
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Does iTunes let you upload, store and stream your own music?
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Yes. (Score:3)
Does iTunes let you upload, store and stream your own music?
ITunes with Match does.
Re:99 cents an album! (Score:5, Informative)
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Google should have a 99 cent album each day.
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telling off spammers (Score:2)
if I hadn't already posted, I would have given you +1 Informative for that ... telling it like it is.