Users of Google Music, announced Wednesday, can now purchase albums and songs online, and have them sent directly to their Android phones or Google Music locker. But should you use it? We took it for a quick spin and, so far, we're impressed.
You are limited to storing 20,000 songs in your Google Music locker, though any music you purchase through Google’s music store won’t count against that number. Songs kept in your locker will be available to stream or download to all your devices and computers that use the same Gmail account.
Downloading a song or album is painless; in fact, the process is the same as it is when you buy an app through the Android Market. You simply click on the price of the song or album that you want, select a payment method, and the purchase is automatically saved to your Google Music locker. From your locker, you can listen to the song you just downloaded, share the song with friends, or continue shopping. If you choose to share your purchase with friends, you'll get a pop-up box that will ask you to share the full track on Google+. Songs purchased from Google Music are stored and downloaded as 320kbps MP3 files.
Instantaneous Appearance of Your Music
The biggest benefit of Google Music is that all of your purchases show up almost instantaneously across your devices. If you have the Google Music app installed on your Android phone, your entire Google Music locker is available for you to stream over the air. If you are worried about a weak Internet connection interrupting your jams, you can save your songs directly to your phone’s SD card, so you can rock out even in areas with low signal strength. You can install the Google Music app on Honeycomb-based tablets as well, but when I tried it, some of the text in the app was jumbled together into an unreadable mess.
If you have an Android phone and have been looking for a good way of carrying around your music, Google Music and the Music Locker will make your life quite a bit easier. Compared to iTunes, Google’s music offerings don’t feel like they're as comprehensive, but that may change over the coming months as more and more artists sign up for the service.
This story, "Get Started With Google's New Music Store" was originally published by PCWorld.