Google Launches Free Scan and Match Music Service to Compete With Apple and Amazon

[AppleScruff1]

Originally Posted by jmcrutch

So, Apple struck a negotiated deal with all the labels so that they would be compensated for the music uploaded, much of which has been pirated by some.

Now, Google is doing the same thing, without charging anyone for it. How are the artists getting paid for the cloud versions? Is Google just footing the bill? Maybe. Probably. All under the guise of sucking you further into their world where they make money off of who you are, what you do, what you write, what you search for, and what you think.

I'll stick with Apple, paying my fee, so that I'm the customer and not the product.

You don't think that Apple is doing the same thing?

[Four oF NINE]

Does this work with iTunes? How do they know my music library?

[wknapp0924]

Originally Posted by BigHonkingDeal

I use Google music on my iPhone & iPad..... works great. The free gMusik app even supports Airplay.

I have all my music uploaded to the Google cloud and pay nothing. They have a music upload utility that uploads automatically everything I add to iTunes....

Well considering I got locked out of my itunes match account for 90 days because my wife wanted use the computer I might just cancel it and upload my music to google now.

[jmcrutch]

Nothing is truly free. There is a price in there somewhere; with Google, it's you and everything you ever do on the internet that is the commodity they charge.

[AppliedMicro]

So as a far as I gathered:

iTunes Match: 256kbps AAC, downloadable
Amazon: 256kbps MP3, downloadable (?)
Google Play: up to 320kbps streaming-only (?)

Or did I make a mistake there?

I'm not much interested in streaming but would rather download to store on HD and I prefer MP3 over vendor-specific formats (AAC). So should I go with Amazon?

[vertgo]

Originally Posted by iMikeT

All you cheapos should pay for the music you acquire. Artists need to eat too you know.

I thought this was for us to upload music that we already paid for. Like stuff off of amazon and google, etc.

Originally Posted by jmcrutch

All under the guise of sucking you further into their world where they make money off of who you are, what you do, what you write, what you search for, and what you think.

I'll stick with Apple, paying my fee, so that I'm the customer and not the product.

Yeah, Apple surely isn't trying to get you stuck in their ecosystem. I'll just take this movie I bought on itunes and watch it on my non-apple device now...

[jmcrutch]

Originally Posted by wknapp0924

Well considering I got locked out of my itunes match account for 90 days because my wife wanted use the computer I might just cancel it and upload my music to google now.

I switch back and forth between two iTunes accounts all the time and it doesn't lock me out of iTunes Match. Am I just getting lucky or is there something different about your setup.

I remember that there used to be a 90 rule about associating a computer with a particular account, but I didn't know if it still applied anymore, given that I switch back and forth all the time.

Maybe I'm just missing the critical piece of the puzzle through myopic lenses.

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Originally Posted by vertgo

I thought this was for us to upload music that we already paid for. Like stuff off of amazon and google, etc.



Yeah, Apple surely isn't trying to get you stuck in their ecosystem. I'll just take this movie I bought on itunes and watch it on my non-apple device now...

Apple most definitely wants you as a customer. But Google is like a drug dealer; giving you things for free and then making money on your back with all of your data and information.

People willingly turn over every bit of their online privacy for free stuff. It amazes me.

[thebluepointe]

I love my Mac Mini, but when it came to buying a tablet, I just couldn't justify Apple. $199 for a 16GB tablet and we're starting to get equally strong services, if not better in some instances. Plus, when it goes obsolete in a few years, I won't feel bad about letting it go.

Music match is just icing on the cake.

[unobtainium]

Hmm, I wonder if it works any better than iTunes Match, which still has a lot of trouble recognizing many songs, even though they are present in the iTunes store.

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Originally Posted by AppleScruff1

You don't think that Apple is doing the same thing?

Actually, no. I think Google's entire business model revolves around selling customer information to advertisers. Apple's business model is quite different - they actually make money off the hardware they sell.

[jmcrutch]

Originally Posted by AppliedMicro

So as a far as I gathered:

iTunes Match: 256kbps AAC, downloadable
Amazon: 256kbps MP3, downloadable (?)
Google Play: up to 320kbps streaming-only (?)

Or did I make a mistake there?

I'm not much interested in streaming but would rather download to store on HD and I prefer MP3 over vendor-specific formats (AAC). So should I go with Amazon?

iTunes Match matches songs that you have stored on your computer in bit-rates higher than 256kbps equally. So if you have all of your songs in ALAC then it will upload them in ALAC and if you stream those songs to your car-radio via iPhone you'll be hearing ALAC.

[Nunyabinez]

I tried to use Google's service, but it doesn't recognize Apple's formats. Most of my library is in Apple Lossless so I'd have to convert it all to MP3 to use Google. Maybe most of you are using MP3 instead of AAC, so it wouldn't be a problem, but it's a non-starter for me.

[jontech]

waste of time


Match the song with Google Play, then again they don't have a complete a library as iTunes, so nothing to see here.

Amazon and iTunes do it better, much better already

[Rogifan]

Still amazes me that people think anything is really ever "free". But hey if you want to go over to the fruit company to get your "free" goodies more power to you.

[TennisandMusic]

Originally Posted by kjs862

maybe i was a bit harsh. but i'm beginning to think that apple has some tough times ahead. internet services are in google's dna, not apple's. in fact, apple has a bad track record with internet services. being that the industry is moving to all cloud computing, google will have the advantage. take for example google docs. what a great alternative to ms office. apple has been working on building their own office but failed in my opinion. and they have been hard at work on it for a long time.

i recently had to use docs and was so happy how it worked, i'm considering moving my 50gbs of data from my dropbox to google drive. and then i may even get a google phone so it all 'just works'.

i totally understand how you can view apple vs google is like apple vs ms in the 80's. but in today's apple vs google, today's ms (google) stuff at least works, very well.

another thing that worries me about apple is their increase in collaboration, for example with tom-tom maps, yelp., and now foursquare. for a company that likes to keep a lot of things in-house, they are doing a lot of collaboration. if you look at google's offerings, they did maps, a yelp alternative in house with their own data.

Oh yeah, I pretty much agree with everything you're saying here. I am considering moving my iPhone 5 to a Nexus 4. the iPhone is just not that great anymore, outside of the actual design of the device. iOS feels so backwards and constricting. Google's cloud services are amazing, whereas iCloud is just horrible for the most part. Sadly, I don't think a lot of Apple die hards realize how big the gulf between the two actually is.

[jmcrutch]

Remember that if you are signed into ANY Google service on a computer, cell phone or tablet, then Google will keep specific records of every search you perform. When you are not signed in, they keep them for a limited time, then delete them. But when you are signed in, such as with GMail, GoogleDocs, GoogleMusic (whatever its called), YouTube, etc, then Google's policy is to track your searches and keep them on there servers under your account FOREVER.

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Originally Posted by jmcrutch

Remember that if you are signed into ANY Google service on a computer, cell phone or tablet, then Google will keep specific records of every search you perform. When you are not signed in, they keep them for a limited time, then delete them. But when you are signed in, such as with GMail, GoogleDocs, GoogleMusic (whatever its called), YouTube, etc, then Google's policy is to track your searches and keep them on there servers under your account FOREVER.

To clarify, Google keeps every search performed through Google ever, and always. But as far as associating that search with you, it's only permanently associated if the search is performed while you are "signed in" to Google. Listening to music stored in Google's cloud would definitely qualify as being signed in.

This is not ok with me. Just my $.02.

[jason2811]

Can someone explains what this means and how it would help me? I keep all my music in iTunes (20GBs). None of my music was downloaded from iTunes-- it all came from external services such as CDs I ripped.

[Carlanga]

I already had uploaded my 15K library; Maybe they will upgrade my music to 320 on the cloud.

EDIT: "If you’re a longtime Google Play Music user, you don’t need to re-upload your files to have them matched. In the next few months, we'll automatically match what we can of your existing library."

[wknapp0924]

[QUOTE=jmcrutch;16518451]I switch back and forth between two iTunes accounts all the time and it doesn't lock me out of iTunes Match. Am I just getting lucky or is there something different about your setup.

I remember that there used to be a 90 rule about associating a computer with a particular account, but I didn't know if it still applied anymore, given that I switch back and forth all the time.

Maybe I'm just missing the critical piece of the puzzle through myopic lenses.[COLOR="#808080"]

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Well I don't fully understand the 90 day Lingo, but my wife was logged into her account on the computer and either clicked on Itunes Match or tried to download a past purchase and she locked me out. I can't access Itunes match or any of my movies or music now on the main computer. I haven't had the motivation to call and bitch though since I use Apple Tv for those things at home.

[Karma*Police]

Originally Posted by nfl46

I'm seriously considering moving to Android when Key Lime is released. They offer Apple like services a lot cheaper! Tired of paying premium when Google is offering their tablets, phones and maps for a lower cost.

Personally, I think their products are superior and justifies a premium price. The challenge for Apple is staying one step ahead to keep justifying those premiums.

With Google's business model being to follow the leader, the question is, are you willing to wait years for Google to deliver "Apple-like" products like the iPhone and iPad or services like iTunes Match? For example, Android users are still waiting for an Apple TV like experience with the recently introduced AirPlay clone in JB, years after Apple introduced it.

[Nunyabinez]

Originally Posted by jmcrutch

iTunes Match matches songs that you have stored on your computer in bit-rates higher than 256kbps equally. So if you have all of your songs in ALAC then it will upload them in ALAC and if you stream those songs to your car-radio via iPhone you'll be hearing ALAC.

I'm not sure I understood what you wrote. My experience is that when something isn't matched it will do the following:

1. If the bit rate is 320 or below, it will copy the file as is in the bit rate it is in.
2. If the bit rate is above 320 it will resample it at 256 on your machine and then transfer it as a 256K AAC file.

Maybe that's what you said, but all my Apple Lossless files that aren't matched are turned into 256k AAC, which is good because it still very often doesn't match one or more songs in an album.

[Saladinos]

Originally Posted by vertgo

I thought this was for us to upload music that we already paid for. Like stuff off of amazon and google, etc.

Yeah, Apple surely isn't trying to get you stuck in their ecosystem. I'll just take this movie I bought on itunes and watch it on my non-apple device now...

It might not work for movies, but you can download your iTunes-match supplied .m4a files and stick them on to an Android device and play them with the native music player.

Apple don't love DRM. Even when they had it on music it was the most liberal DRM around (you could even burn those tracks to CD). Nobody offers DRM-free movies because the license holders (the movie studios) won't let them.

Apple really doesn't care if owners of other devices want to take their content with them - they're not going to make things more difficult for them, but they're not going to fight ridiculously hard to make it easy for people to leave their ecosystem. All that Apple cares about is that iOS users can buy and play music and movies quickly and simply.

[neuropsychguy]

Originally Posted by camnchar

How can Google offer this for free?

They don't worry about profit margins like Apple does.

[xizar]

Originally Posted by TXCherokee

iTunes Match has worked flawlessly for me. I'd be interested to know what issues others are having.

I have several albums that do not play properly on my iPhone. They cut out halfway or start the next song in the middle of the current one.

Interestingly, it works fine between computers.

[Dave.UK]

Currently have 12,000 songs uploaded to Google Music which I can access anywhere. I can also download to my phone from Google Music if im going somewhere that I wont have a signal/wifi.

[nfl46]

Originally Posted by Karma*Police

Personally, I think their products are superior and justifies a premium price. The challenge for Apple is staying one step ahead to keep justifying those premiums.

With Google's business model being to follow the leader, the question is, are you willing to wait years for Google to deliver "Apple-like" products like the iPhone and iPad or services like iTunes Match? For example, Android users are still waiting for an Apple TV like experience with the recently introduced AirPlay clone in JB, years after Apple introduced it.

Superior how?

Nexus 4 is top notch, not that plastic crap like the S3.

Nexus 10 - great device, higher resolution screen than the iPad 3/4

Nexus 7 - $150 cheaper than the iPad Mini, feels great in the hand

Google Maps - hands down better than Apple Maps

And so on...if anybody can match Apple in quality, it's Google.

Not the best examples, but you get the point...plus their devices are cheaper than Apple.