Gadgetory

hey what's going on everybody I'm knowing from technobuffalo calm and this is a walk through hands-on early look at music beta by Google this is Google's new music service they rolled out at Google i/o earlier this week it's invite-only right now and unlike other early Google products there are no invites to share it was just rolled out to people who attended the i/o conference which I did so I've got it up and running we're going through a screenshot here of kind of a motion screengrab if you will of the service running in a browser window on a Mac but on a computer it's browser based so we'll go through this real quick and then after that we'll get a little more in depth with looking at it on a couple of Android devices a phone and the tablet so basically the way it works is once you sign in you link this to your google account and then you upload your own music to the cloud to google servers as of right now there is no store for renting or buying music from google there are some links that let you shop for music I will take a look at that later when we look at the service running on an Android smartphone but those just take you to a google shopping search results page not to any sort of Google store lots of talk about how Google wanted to have the record labels on board and they're still trying to do that so we'll see what happens and it'll be especially interesting to see once this rolls out and what if anything Google's going to charge people to use the service you know if you're going to use this as opposed to something like rhapsody or Napster or rd io or mog or any of the services where you know you pay a monthly subscription fee but you basically just rent all the music you want let alone something like itunes or amazon mp3 where you buy music anyway I here's the web interface and it you know it works well it's it's easy to use its functioning you know quite well you can sort through your library on the different ways on the left there by songs artists albums genres you can set up auto playlists based on a pandora style thumbs-up thumbs-down kind of thing or you can create instant mixes which is kind of akin to apples genius mix in this case you pick a song and then you hit the instant mix button and it creates a mix based off of that song I haven't really gone in depth and analyzing how it chooses which songs the b.o.b mix that I made there on the left based on outkast song that one stuff pretty well to hip-hop R&B kind of stuff so that made sense I made another one off of a spy mix song which is this random band that I was in and that was all over the place so go figure you can also create playlists you saw me earlier you can drag and drop songs into playlists which is very easy to manage very nice and then here's the music manager piece of it which is an app that you download and run in your computer that lets you upload your music from your computer up to Google's cloud based servers so i'm downloading it now for the mac it's a disk image it's about 18 megabytes and it basically runs in the background and you access it via the mac system preferences once it's running now obviously there are versions of the app that work on on Windows machines as well so et cetera but here it is you just drag and drop it and then when you open it up like I said it first the first time you load it up it pops up isn't as a nap but once it's up and running you access it like I sent via the system preferences and really all you're doing is you're telling it you're linking to your google account and then you're telling the app what music you want to upload this can be a little tricky if you want certain of your music but not all of it you have to go through and put it into folders and select which folders to upload and which ones you don't want to upload in my case all of my music is in my music folder my music directory inside of different sub directors inside of that and I said you know what let's just upload it all so I choose a music folder I hit continue and it starts uploading in the background now the first thing that has to do is scan and the scam process takes a little while and the upload process actually it's a little bit slower once I actually you know win it and thought about how many megabytes are being moved and how long it's taking and compared at-bat to something like uploading a you know 200 men YouTube file it's actually kind of been slow in the upload process at any rate that all happens in the backgrounds you can leave that running and so one of the things that's really cool about the android market now is that you can install an app from your from the webview and shoot it out over the air to a device so i'll go send it to another device guys are i've already installed the music app on one actually more than one device so here's a list of all the devices that have been registered to my account now you know a review a lot of stuff so what kind of what can I tell you so it's on my nexus s 4g so I'm the Samsung device I'm going to go ahead excuse me and install it on just want to get this in the window here so you can see how it works the ADR 6350 which is more commonly known as the incredible 2 from HTC for verizon so there is the ADR 6350 which is a device that already has my google account on you can see I've got you know gmail notification everything so going to go ahead and hit select that and then hit install and processing the install requests and look at that there is I got the notification instantly very IM you're instantly you know pretty much instantly you're very very cool and you can see now oh it's done we're installed and so if i go now to successfully installed music there you see it at the top so to show you now how it runs we can just leave this on the background and so actually in the background here i should still have yeah music major so more than 8,000 songs found and we're going to go ahead and just say think this previously from a different machine that had a much smaller music library on it so now it's going to go ahead and just upload all these songs in the background and just continue to add them to my library so in the meantime i will just leave this running in the background and we can go ahead and we can hide so i go ahead and hide everything else that's running in the background there's part of my music folder you know more than 8,000 tracks got a ton of stuff in there and that'll just upload in the background and as those songs are upload they'll be available to me via google music or music beta by google and there's that there's my little and installed a notifier a little menu up in the menu bar so 121 of about 8,200 installed or uploaded so far 122 now so you just go into the background so leave that running come back to the phone here and we'll run music and so what it needs to do is start sinking so it's going to take it a second the first time see if I hit learn morons can save me the web page where i can learn more ok and so there we go invited a music player by google cetera et cetera select the account to link to this so select the account to link to music beta so we'll go ahead and do that and I've now been added to my its and I'm going to add to my google account and so basically I'm just adding a new device and now the songs that I have in there which are still uploading in the background you know more and more what are we up to now from Troy 6 those that just keep running and so here's the interface for music beta on android phone it'll rotate so you can use it in either landscape or portrait and this is connected over Wi-Fi right now it'll work over Wi-Fi or cellular so let's go to a bit outcast and you can see the song view go back so now it's streaming so it takes it a little second to start buffering and streaming and then this will play in the background to leave it playing go back I could stop if I want to I can make an instant mix I can make a playlist you know similar to the desktop interface or the web interface i should say i could hit Outkast go see all the outcasts that I have I'll put something else on will Bob Dylan and so again it's streaming it's not local so it does take you know depending on your network connection but I mean that was Wi-Fi that was very fast then it went ahead and started streaming and so you can hit the music icon up there in the corner to go back if I go to settings so okay so one thing down here in the menu make available offline so this is what google calls pinning and it basically means mobile caching so now I hit the make available offline I've got just about 15 gigs free of my device so I go ahead and choose what I want to be pinned to be cached locally for me to listen to when I don't have connectivity so blood on the tracks made the whole album will make I don't even know what's on here Matt I have some weird old music and some weird new music and some good music and some lame music oh it doesn't matter let's gooo the church unknown album by the church so okay we'll leave those available for pinning and now let's go keep the phone running but let's go to settings and go to wireless and networks and disable all wireless connections and now you can see the icons changed so unable to download songs at this time okay right so it can't it can't put it can't download those songs that I had set to pin because around the connection anymore I'm an airplane mode it's continuing to play Bob Dylan title button below I'll hit pause for a second and now let's show only the music that's available offline and site so now you can see that the music that I set to pin so that outcast and the Bob Dylan is available some of the other stuff is not just because it hadn't had a chance to download all of it yet and so basically that's how it works so it's kind of nicely you can set the mobile caching or the local caching I should say you know the pinning is they call it to pin whichever tracks you want you can do that right here on the device and kind of manually manage it you know pretty easily the interface is pretty nice it's clean I'll show you the interface on a tablet as well this is the galaxy tab 10-1 limited edition the google i/o edition which i should point out this is not the final software for this device but it's been working pretty well so in general so I here's here's music i already had music open earlier so we'll go back a little bit and on the Tabata looks really nice you've got all the album the album art and then you can use the menu the contextual menu to drop down and look at how you want to search your menu search your library I should say so I'll go to songs I can search through all the songs instead and also David Bowie you get the nice full view you can rotate kind of hard to get this little thing interview here the camera to push this back can go for number by her lips turned on by a little bit and actually I should be able I think I haven't actually tried this yet but i think i should be able will turn airplane mode off here and get Wi-Fi back and Wi-Fi is back now so i should be able to stream different music two different devices I would think library options all music and so so you're gonna play Al Green and there you go i'm streaming two different songs from my same Google Music account to two different devices that a problem should i could get a third one going here on the laptop yep so there you go i can be signed in multiple places on my same account playing multiple songs streaming from the cloud via google music or music beta by google a couple things i'll mention or one thing i'll mention i tested this out kind of more extensively what is like which ones playing i tested this out a little more extensively the other day on a nexus s 4g on sprint walking from my house to the bart train taking bart from oakland bart as the commuter train here in the bay area taking bart from oakland into san francisco to go go to google i/o getting off the train walking to the conference etc and the one thing I found is that when i hit network issues with the network you know obviously that's going to affect the playback and what was interesting and you know little not surprising but but a little disappointing i guess was that when i went to hand offs from 4g areas to 3g areas the music streamwood hiccup and so you know they're going to be depending on you know that's going to help it if you hit a cell phone dead zone but with the new 4g phones that handoff area is a problem in terms of you know certain data applications and certainly it's been a problem for me on the sprint phone i haven't tried a verizon 4g phone yet with google music or music beta i want to call it that but google music but with the sprint phone it was an issue just the handoff from 4g 2 3g i definitely you know felt it or i should say heard it when they hiccup in the music which is to back to bad aside from that the service it works really low for what it does like i said at the top you know this is a by all accounts not what google wanted to launch they wanted to launch something with a bunch of the music studios on board I had one way or another but they weren't able to do that hopefully you know for Google's sake for the sake of people want to use the service they will be able to get something worked out and whether that's you know a music store you can buy tracks directly through google music or a subscription service to rival something like you know our di o or mog or rhapsody or Napster or whatever who knows what it'll be but as it is now you can't buy anything through google but you can upload your music and then stream it and so far it works quite well and the ability to cache stuff locally for playback when you know you're an airplane mode and don't have service that kind of thing also very nice so so far so good for you know what the service is there are a few things that I just competitive you know landscape wise I wish it had the ability to you know buy or rent music through it but for what it is it works really well thumbs up so far in general from me for the music beta by Google there you go little a little lengthy walk through if you have questions you want to know more no I don't have any invites there are no invites to share and I'm not just saying that so you want to ask it's the truth there are no invites to share at this point but if you want to know more about it definitely hit me up on Twitter over on TechnoBuffalo calm and I will try to answer questions to keep you updated as the service you know expands and grows and everything i'll show you the tab with you one more time but in the meantime here's a first look at music beta by google for the various android devices and if I go home here you can see there's a widget I've installed already so I can control the music from the home screen and then just tap through to launch the app so very cool works very well there you go much much more a music beta by Google and everything else going on an Android land musicland technology land over on techno Buffalo calm till next time my name is Noah thanks for watching see ya you