I was pretty excited when Amazon beat the crowd that matters to the cloud with the Amazon Cloud Player. Since I buy all of my music from Amazon, it is convenient to have my music purchases sent directly to my Amazon cloud, for immediate playing, and downloading only as needed.
I was so excited, in fact, that I bought a bunch more cloud space and began the arduous process of moving my huge music collection to the cloud.
But there was a little problem. Like many audiophiles, I am pretty anal where my music tags and artwork are concerned. If I see a mislabeled genre or mixed up album cover, I need- who am I kidding, I simply must have- a way to quickly fix it.
On the Amazon cloud, that’s not all that easy to do. Amazon doesn’t (yet) provide a way to edit song or album details from the cloud. You have to download the songs you want to fix, delete them from the cloud, fix them locally and then re-upload them.
That’s sort of a drag. Figuratively and literally. I also find Amazon’s music uploader less than elegant and not very reliable.
With Google’s recent introduction of Google Music, there is a new competitor in the cloud. While it’s early, I think I slightly prefer Google’s look and feel.
But probably not enough to outweigh the ability to send my Amazon purchases directly to my Amazon cloud. However, I quickly discovered a feature that tips the scale decidedly in favor of Google. It’s much more appealing than Lady Gaga. It’s the ability to edit from the cloud!
Sweet!
At the end of the day, the process to get my new music from Amazon to Google Music is pretty simple, and automated. I configured Google Music Manager to monitor my Amazon download folder, and automatically upload whatever shows up there.
I agree that Apple may one day deliver a cloud-dominating knock-out punch, but that may take some time, as you can never count out the innovation adverse music industry (as an aside, I get a few dollars from BMI every quarter or so, and I still can’t abide the obstacles these organizations keep tossing on the path to access). They may be trying to protect someone’s income, but I’m not certain it’s the songwriters’.
In any event, I’m pretty excited about Google Music. The 20,000 song limit will prevent me from moving all of my music there (at least until cheap extra storage becomes available, like Amazon offers).
But as of now, it’s leading the race to become my default music manager. Stay tuned, however, because the race is just beginning.
