Music beta by Google Hands-on

About a month ago Google finally announced a cloud based music service. For the past few years I've been wondering if they were going to get into the music player business. Once I heard about music beta I knew I had to get my hands on it. I decided to sign up for it right away and within a music weeks was accepted to give it a try. Google isn't the only one with a cloud based music player, Amazon was the first to release one and Apple is soon going to launch there's. Since there are options I decided that I would spend a week with Googles and Amazons to determine which one is better.

For those of you that don't know what music beta by Google works here is a quick summary. With music beta, you download a Music Manager on your computer. With the manager you set the location where the music is on your computer that you want to put on the cloud. The cloud is a server that Google has where users can place their music so they can access it anywhere there is an Internet connection.

Is the Music Manager is needed to load music to the cloud that is where I will start. The Music Manager has a fairly simple interface. On the first tab you have the option of where the music is that you want to put on the cloud. The options are iTunes, Windows Media Player, My Music folder, or other folders. Since I have over 70 GB of music on my netbook I selected other folders so I could have more control over want goes on the cloud since I don't need all my music up there. The second tab allows you to select how often music gets sent to the cloud. The options here are Automactically, Once per Hour, Day, or Music, and then Manually. I've selected manually so music only gets added when I want it. There is also another option for how much bandwidth you want to allocate for uploading the music. In the Music Manager there is also a button at launches the Music Player which opens in a web browser.

Now that I have my Music Manager set up, it's time to add music to the cloud. I've selected just under 1 GB worth of music to add. I've selected the bandwidth allocation to be the fastest possible. Let's see how long this takes. The music gets added to the cloud 2 songs at a time, this could take a while.