Since I’m always on the lookout for better music systems, I played with Google Music Beta a bit over the last week.
Pros:
- The interface is pretty clean, but it’s a pain to make your own playlists (like it is with most jukeboxes).
- They have an “instant mix” button which makes a playlist based on the song and seems to work well enough; can’t tell if it’s better than MongoMusic was (back in the day) or not.
- It’s free (for now at least)
- Supports unprotected WMA in addition to MP3 and M4A (neither Amazon Music, nor Apple iCloud support WMA)
Cons:
- You have to upload your music (Apple got a license to do fingerprint matching which would be much faster). So far for me it looks like it will take more than a week, to do the 20K songs.
- Website doesn’t really work on my iPad or iPhone. This is a touchscreen UI issue, not a technical one (since their web UI uses HTML5 not Flash), so this can get fixed when they want to.
- I couldn’t get the Google Music app to work on my cheapo Android phone. Didn’t try to find out why, so this is probably user error.
- It’s capped at 20K songs which is enough for most people (but not me).
So basically Google Music is going to be the best option (better than Apple or Amazon), with a little work on their end. I’d even pay an annual fee to use it, if they fix the points above.