News Google brings Google Music to the Cloud

Google has announced its own cloud-based music service, although licencing issues abound.

http://www.bit-tech.net/news/bits/2011/05/11/google-brings-google-music-to-the-cloud/1

 

The cloud is an accident waiting to happen. And convenient at the same time.

 

I don't see the point. i have my music on my pc. and some of it on my phone. its a 16gb card on my phone, so i have a huge part of my music on it.
If I were to instead stream music to my phone. i would kill my data plan in no time. Why would I want to do that?

 

You're just to old school.
Don't you know EVERYBODY-EVERYWHERE has full-speed-internet-on-the-go?
So everything has to be always connected just to...work?

Okay off-sarcasm, you're right off course, but internet-function developers tend to live in areas where the wireless coverage is dense, and their employers pay the bill.
The same goes for online-navigation systems for instance.
(And if I read how these services are tested...the same goes for tech journalists and game developers.) ;-)

Appearently, nobody lives in the countryside and has a flaky yet expensive internet connection.
My Name is Nobody

 

It's a good thing we're all on symmetric 100Mb broadband connections, isn't it...

 

Data plans cant cope with this level of traffic for any reasonable price yet, i use spotify on my phone (premium ) and i have to be careful with that, so never mind 20,000 files...
try connecting to wifi effectively on a sony ericsson xperia mini to do the downloads too

 

Upload mp3 files? Isn't that illegal?

 

To my understanding this is only for your own use.

Similiar to Spotify. Which I'm sure most users would prefer.

 

Great idea but the data caps are going to be the killer here, as pointed out by Chris.

However, as soon as I heard about Amazon Cloud I wanted it, and Google Music could be a good alternative too

 

I'm well up for it, I don't mind uploading my music overnight for a few days to have it stored on a cloud!

 

How long would it take you to upload 20,000 mp3 files? And when I read what TB-L originally wanted the web for - why should there be thousands of copies of the same music file on the web, rather than one copy that can be accessed by everybody?

 

I'm much more interested in how the licensing is going to work out. Google (and Apple) negotiated terms with content providers before releasing their service, while Amazon just said 'it's the users' music to do with as they please'. If Amazon can set a new precedent for what we can do with music we purchase that'll really float my boat.

 

This is interesting to me that bandwidth is such a concern for you guys. Sorry for my ignorance, but are bandwidth limits more stringent in the UK?

I'm happy to hear about Google Music, but I guess I'm fortunate to be on a 200Mb connection and have unlimited transfer to my mobile.

 

I hate clouds, I don't see any huge advantages compared to it's disadvantages

 

Clouds are an accident waiting to happen and does anybody really need more than 4gb's worth of music or whatever your iPod/phone can offer on them?

 

Oh yes.

You pay for 20Mbps ADSL... lets just say I've not talked to anyone (in real life) who has 20Mb ADSL internet and gets more than about 5 or 6Mbps - I myself get 1.8Mbps so I cancelled it and went back to my old ISP, which I don't like much, but at least gives me half decent speeds. Combine that with what is tantamount to bandwidth caps in the form of hard throttling that will essentially make your connection useless - 1000ms+ pings, 1MB/s dropping to 50KB/s...

And mobile data caps are ridiculous. The companies that advertise 'unlimited' data plans hide behind a 'Fair Use Policy' which usually means they either a) cut you off or b) rape your wallet if you exceed more than 500MB a month (combined uploads and downloads) so this is useless for mobile music consumption... which is what it's designed for. And they change that arbitrarily and it's in your contract that they can change the terms with notice of 30 days, so there's nowt you can do about it if they want to drop a 1GB monthly 'fair use' to 250MB or less.

...

Until the ISPs worldwide (but particularly outside of the US/Korea/Sweden/Japan) get their act together about the amount of data that is consumed via what are now fairly "basic" internet usage patterns, cloud computing of any shape or form is a joke.

 

I agree, they are just harping back to the 80s...mainframe aka cloud, same diff!

 

Cloud will never work as long as we have CAPs on our Internet Service and I know in the US 56% of Americans cant get any form of high speed internet outside of crappy sat service. ~_~

 

We're limited to the MP3 file format only? WTF

 

I don't think something like "unlimited transfer to my mobile" exists here
Affordable mobile data plans cap at about 1Gb/Month.