Venturing into “the cloud”: My continuing adventures with Google Music Beta
First off, I can’t stand the term “the cloud.” I suppose I understand the metaphor—that rather than having my digital files stored on a specific computer server, they’re just sort of floating out there somewhere in the wild blue Internet … like water droplets in the sky—but it infuriates me for reasons even I don’t entirely understand. To me, the concept of cloud computing sounds more like the scene in “It’s a Wonderful Life,” where George Bailey tells the townsfolk: “The money’s not here. Your money’s in Joe’s house … and 100 others.” But I’m guessing no one wants to have their high-tech innovation associated with bank runs.
Anyway, I’ve known for a while that I needed to back up my digital music files somewhere. Every MP3 I’ve spent the last six years accumulating, my most precious musical acquisitions, is on a little external hard drive that I might misplace or could get a super-powerful electromagnet set on top of it at any moment. I flirted with the idea of buying a second, wireless hard drive that would automatically back up my music, but once I figured out what this cloud business was all about, and how easy it would be to wirelessly stream my music, it sounded like a better deal.
I looked at all three of the major players that have entered the cloud fray. My issue with both Apple’s iCloud and Amazon’s Cloud Player is that, with the exception of music purchased through their respective music stores, there’s essentially a 5 GB limit on what you can store for free. (If you want to get technical, it is a bit more complicated than that. If you’re interested in details, enjoy this handy-dandy comparison chart.) I have approximately 53 GB of music, and I want access to it all. To do that through either Apple or Amazon, I’d have to sign up for a paid plan. That would cost me something in the neighborhood of $20 or $25 a year, which is fairly reasonable if you’re gainfully employed, but my broke ass was looking for something more in the $0 to $0 range.
Which lead me to Google, which is offering a beta test version of its music service for free. Its limit is 20,000 songs—offering ample room for my music collection to continue growing for several years.
The drawback, compared to Apple anyway, is that you have to upload your entire music collection. For me, the process took approximately four days. The Google Music Manager worked quietly in the background, and I didn’t notice any appreciable difference in my ability to, for example, stream last night’s episode of “The Daily Show.”
The browser-based music player is working just fine and seems easy enough to use. I was a little disappointed it couldn’t create online versions of all the dynamic “smart playlists” I use to manage my music through my desktop iTunes player, but the regular playlists I’ve created over the years all transferred over to cloud land.
The major problem I’ve run into is that the Music Manager skipped 302 of my songs during the upload process. Most of these were songs I bought from iTunes back when it still bundled a bunch of DRM restrictions with purchases, so, OK, whatever, I guess I understand and can blame Apple or the music industry for that. But there are still 24 songs that were skipped for unspecified reasons, labeled “error uploading file.” Furthermore, when I went to listen to “Drive” by R.E.M. today, it was missing even though a) the rest of Automatic for the People was all present and accounted for, b) I ripped the entire album from a CD and c) it doesn’t appear to be listed among the 302 skipped songs.
So I started mucking around with the Music Manager. I switched settings from “automatic” to “manual” mode and clicked the “update now” button. The progress bar, which preciously had told me all 11,156 songs had been added to my Google Music account, now started moving backwards. Were my songs getting un-uploaded? I had no idea, but I didn’t want to undo four days worth of work. I switched back to “automatic,” then back to “manual” again, and the progress bar started moving forward again.
That’s where I find myself at this moment. I plan to restart the computer once it has finished un-un-uploading and see what happens next.
UPDATE: After restarting, I checked in on the Music Manager. It had started cycling through my library, apparently not uploading, just scanning. When it was finished, it told me 11,178 songs had been uploaded and 280 skipped. Evidently those 24 “error uploading file” songs were now included in the tally of uploaded songs. They weren’t listed on the troubleshooting page any more. But when I searched for one of those songs in my online library, it still didn’t turn up. “Drive” is still missing, too.
Meanwhile, the Music Manager is now counting down again, from 11,178 to zero. I’m not so worried about the songs that have uploaded disappearing anymore, so I’m going to let it finish and see what happens.
UPDATE UPDATE: OK, after only 1,000 songs or so, the Music Manager reversed course and started counting up again. The hell?
On the advice of a few online forums, I’m going to try uninstalling the Music Manager and then re-installing it.
UPDATE UPDATE UPDATE: I fully expected when I checked my library this morning that the re-install was going to have had zero effect, but I was pleasantly surprised. “Drive” as well as a few other songs that I’d noticed were mysteriously missing from otherwise complete albums were all present and accounted for. So, yup, anybody who is having difficulty after the initial upload, I recommend a re-installation. (Google has complete uninstall instructions detailing all the files you need to trash before re-installing.)
There are still a couple songs that are still stuck somewhere in Google limbo. “The Lion Sleeps Tonight,” for some reason, is M.I.A., but this is close enough that I think I’ll be pretty satisfied. And you can’t beat the price.
