Gadgetory

hi everybody michael fisher with pocket now google has launched its spotify competitor Google Music all access and we're going to show it to you so the premise of Google Play all-access is that Google can do a better job of learning and eventually predicting what you want to hear than other services at least in theory it's going live in geo specific areas right now and if you're in a live market like the US you can sign up for a trial read the fine print here though you pay per month once the free trial is over but the plus side is it's $7.99 a month instead of $9.99 if you sign up now it would have been nice to see Google try and be a bit more competitive on pricing against services like Spotify but for early adopters or Google fans the $8 price versus the $10 price is a nice incentive once you update the Google Music app on your phone you'll see the new interface with the revised features I didn't even have Google music and my quick apps because I didn't find it terribly useful before but maybe the new features will change that popping in you can see my library which is the repository of your tracks you can search for your favorite artists and add an album here and Google has also pre-populated my library with some music it thinks I'd like we'll see you can tap any of the tracks you've put in your library to start them playing and it will auto populate the album art and such though it looks like there's a warping problem with this particular example it's cool that it pans and scans across the art though this interface is familiar from apps like Spotify and it's easy to navigate within my library you can organized by song album genre and so on and you can also hop back out to the main menu tree to check out Google auto-generated playlists create radio stations which should improve as you listen more and explore which is supposed to make it easy to figure out what to play next again based on how often you use it hopping back to playlists to answer the million dollar question yes you can add entire albums to a playlist and yes you can download them directly to the device for offline listening finally hopping into settings we see the familiar tweaks and account level controls in fact a lot of this is very familiar indeed when we put it right up next to Spotify it's up to time to determine whether it's a more compelling offering in the long run if you think it will be you can save two bucks a month every month by signing up before June 30th in the meantime we hope you've enjoyed this quick tour of Google Music all access stay tuned to pocket now for much more from Google i/o 2013 and beyond