Hello friends IdeaFox!
Most recently, an event happened that our music lovers were waiting for - Google Play Music service officially launched in Russia.
As a passionate music lover, I also decided to test this service, and share my impressions. There are many advantages, but not without problems, as they say.
What is Google Play Music?
This is a new-fangled cloud service that allows you to access millions of licensed music tracks from a mobile phone and from a regular computer.
Of course, first of all, this project was created as a service for mobile devices running Android, and not for PC.
Why did you like it?
I have repeatedly written on the blog that I respect copyrights and use only licensed software and music. Here, for a very reasonable fee, access is given to a huge music library.
There is no need to “rob” disks, convert them to MP3, upload them to the phone’s memory, etc., etc.
Of course, you can set aside time and transfer my collection from a computer and CD to your phone ... But to be honest, I have neither the time nor the desire. I just want to turn on the phone, press a couple of buttons, and listen to my favorite music without any troubles with flash drives and other wires.
How much is?
At the moment, they give 30 days of a free period, after which the monthly subscription fee \u003d 169 rubles will turn on. per month.
Given that the cost of a regular album in the store can reach up to 1000 rubles. and above, it can be said that such a price is simply divine. But you need to understand that to use the GPM you will need Internet access and it is better to connect via Wi-Fi or connect the option of unlimited access to the network. Now this option costs from 3 rubles per day.
It’s important to understand that for 169 rubles / month you will be able to listen to music from the cloud, but do not download. If you want to download, you will have to buy separately. The cost of one album is about 100-200 rubles. But you can buy individual tracks for 10-20 rubles.
In principle, no one bothers to upload previously purchased music to the Google Play Music cloud, but not more than 20,000 tracks.
How to install?
We go into the Play Market and install :-)
Please note that until November 15 give 30 days of the free period. This period is more than enough to decide on the future use of the service.
After you click on the “Try” button, you will see the following message:
Do not forget to unsubscribe if the quality / price does not suit. Otherwise, a monthly fee will be debited from your card!
The main GPM window. Very simple interface in which it is impossible to get lost :)
In the search bar we are looking for the desired song. I just wanted to listen to “I Feel Good” by the great James Brown. Great song :)
The track you like can be added to the playlist so you don’t have to look for it again and again :-).
For fun, I bought the track “I feel good” as much as 10 rubles!
How to set up Google Play Music?
I show screenshots of the service settings. Everything is clear, I will not rassusolivat :-)
This is where you can turn off your subscription.
I also adjusted the equalizer to my liking
I didn’t touch anything here.
How to upload your own music from your computer to Google Play Music?
It is clear that in the dense forest there is no high-speed Internet, and MUSHROOMS want to collect with psychedelic music :-)
For such cases, you can upload your own tracks to the cloud and to your phone. Moreover, synchronization will happen automatically, for all your devices running Android.
That is, once your collection has been uploaded to the cloud, and it will automatically appear on your tablet or phones. Naturally, you must use the same Google account on your devices.
So what you need to do:
1. We go from a regular computer to Google Play.
Enter the details of your account that you use on your smartphone!
And click on the headphone icon.
2. Click on the button “Top up your music library”
3. We are offered to install a program to upload our music collection to the cloud.
After installation, we see a simple download manager called Music Manager.
Important: read carefully, do not miss anything, otherwise you are unlikely to download music from Google. It is important to consider several key points. I explain briefly and clearly so as not to take away your precious time.
- The topic of today's article on the personal website of the DJ and musician Nick de Golden. Imagine that you bought a track and you can listen to it calmly on the site. And if you want to listen to it on a computer, on a player, or, say, present it in a club or cafe? In any case, the ability to download is never superfluous. And most importantly - everything is legal and without consequences!
The first step is to open the Google Chrome browser if you are on another. Why? In the future, when downloading a purchased track, you will need to install an application from Google itself, which, perhaps, will be installed only in Chrome. And now in order.
1.
Look for the track you need and buy it, respectively. In my case, it will be one of the old tracks of 2007 “Matt Abbott - Illusions”. Of the remixes, I choose Amphiby’s Crossover Remix. This such a wonderful remix in the style of Deep Trance just drove me crazy ... But this is a matter of taste, as they say :) After Google will prompt you to install an application thanks to which you can download. It will not disturb you, you can not worry. 
2.
After the track is purchased, go to the “My Music” section, located in the upper column on the left. It should also be noted that if the page heading is orange, it is not recommended to use the search located in it, because here it finds only those tracks that you already bought. To return to the current search for all tracks, click on the icon with three lines in the upper left and click on “Google Play”. 
3.
After you have moved to the "My Music" section, click on the cover of the track you bought, and then hover over the name of the track - you will see an ellipsis indicated by the red arrow in the picture below. 
4. Click on the ellipsis and click "Download".
5. Have a nice listening! :)
It is also worth considering that on this service you can find a lot of things, including electronic music in the styles of Trance, House, Techno, Drum & Bass, Chillout and much more. Domestic music in Russian is no exception. There is even a lot of music since the 90s, so ... don’t get bored. You can also download the tracks you bought as much as you want and when you want. Suppose if a track is missing from a computer, then you are given such an opportunity, which is very convenient.
The other day Google launched its music service in Ukraine Play music. With attractive conditions, more than 20 millionth database of compositions, sensible software solutions, and even with a very positive assessment by users in countries where the service has been present for a long time. There was no way to ignore the new product, so I put aside my beloved along with the local library and music from Vkontakte and took up the test. But Play Music turned out to be not just an interesting product - the service once and for all changed my pattern of listening to music, but at the same time made Apple music solutions completely unnecessary, untied my iPhone and iPad from iTunes, and did not leave any chances for music piracy. You think too much, as for one product, even a leading player?
Google Play Music is available on a monthly subscription, and it opens up all the possibilities - access to each track stored in the library, album, collection, downloading songs to devices, library synchronization, recommended and user-defined radio stations with flexible settings. And for this "full stuffing" they ask for 59 UAH 49 UAH per month, at the current rate - $ 4.2. That is, the amount is absolutely not burdensome for most, for the owners of the iPhone and iPad so precisely.
In general, Google did not invent a bicycle. Play Music service combines a cloud library of more than 20 million tracks and customizable online radio (much like iTunes Radio). You can access music from your computer’s browser or through applications for mobile platforms. On iOS, this is the Play Music [iTunes] player, which I will discuss in more detail below. Traditionally for cloud solutions, most actions take place online, which guarantees instant data synchronization between all devices. Whether it’s adding a new album to My Music Library, a “like” mark on the track, or the formation of a new playlist.
But Google was not limited to “classics”. The trump card of Play Music is that you can download any tracks, collections or albums to your device for offline access. Compare two scenarios:
How to add music to iPhone or iPad using iTunes (without subscription to iTunes Match):
- Download audio files to a computer
- Import files to iTunes
- Connect iPhone or iPad to computer
- Mark required files
- Start sync
How to add music to iPhone or iPad using Play Music:
- Find a suitable album / track in the player on the device by searching
- Click the Download Icon
Play Music eliminates the need to buy music, and with this service, it makes no sense to use different pirated sources. Why waste time searching (plus bother with changing clumsy tags, assigning beautiful covers), and even more so paying for each album, if you can just listen? Or download in one touch and listen?
Personally, over the past 3-4 months I have not actually updated the music library. I mainly listened to Apple’s radio on the computer, formed and adapted several “stations” for myself, and collected my favorite tracks on Vkontakte. I tried not to think about the legal side of the issue. About a dozen verified albums have settled on the iPhone, looking for something new, buying, downloading, then also manually synchronizing was lazy. Well, with our mobile Internet and numerous "dead zones" (the same metro), it was rare to indulge yourself with streaming music on the way. Play Music has greatly simplified everything.
How to start using Play Music
Since the service is from Google, the first condition for use is the presence of a company account. But, due to the popularity of Gmail, almost every user on the network has it. Also, the system will request the data of a bank card, from which in the future (the first month is free) a fee for using the service will be charged.
Google play music
The process of creating a Play Music account is completed by choosing your favorite genres and artists. If you take your time and note more cool music, Play Music from the first minutes will delight you with excellent collections. Naturally, not only those musicians that have been noted by you, but many other similar in style and mood.
Player play music
Or rather players, because the service is available both in the browser and on mobile platforms. But the interface is the same everywhere, except on iOS and Android there are “Download” buttons.
The player includes several sections: My library, Playlists, Radio and Browse. In applications, there is also filtering by available offline content, which is convenient.
Music library and playlists not much different from most players. Filtering by genre, artist, album, track is not forgotten, there is a search. Unless the playlists include both those you have created and recommended based on the already formed “musical history”.
Radio stations extremely flexible. They can be formed from albums, artists, tracks and genres, Play Music offers a variety of thematic collections. But there are no stations from famous personalities and companies, as in iTunes. Otherwise, everything is no worse, but there are more opportunities. Firstly, the list of tracks of the “radio station” can be adjusted at your discretion: swap songs, delete unwanted ones. Secondly, songs can be downloaded to the device in the Music Library, added to the playlist. Or go to the album of the song and have them replenish the audio collection.
Menu Overview designed to expand the musical horizons of the user of the service. It includes sections of the Genres, Interesting, Recommended and New and pleases with a flurry of new music in accordance with your preferences. In two days, thanks to the Review, I discovered seven new artists. I am writing this material and raising my spirits with the album "Mandatory Fun" from "Weird Al" Yankovic. I doubt very much that he would have met me somewhere else.
Menu interface play just awesome. Nothing more, large buttons, mandatory information in place. In addition, the album cover is not static, but slowly “floats” from left to right and back. The practical benefit is zero, but it looks very impressive. Like / dislike buttons were placed above the cover. Do not forget about them, as in this way you introduce the system to your musical addictions.
And it looks like a mini browser player Chrome
The service and applications have many small utilities, you can’t tell about everything so quickly. Easier to connect and experience in person. Unless in a nutshell I will describe the storage of music on iOS devices, since I offer Play Music as an alternative to the Music player in conjunction with iTunes.
The tracks are downloaded individually or in whole albums, all without exception. After the download is complete, they are available in the My library menu, a small orange icon indicates which content is available offline. Pressing the icon again deletes the files from the memory, you can also look at the program settings in the "Manage downloaded files" menu and more thoroughly understand the situation. In this version of Play Music, information about the amount of occupied memory is not visible well, but this bug will obviously be fixed. Here, with one click, you can delete all the tracks.
Total
I have been listening to music very actively for two days. At work on a Mac, over a cup of coffee on an iPad, on the go with an iPhone. I listen to more and more new artists, experimenting with genres, jumping from albums to radio stations and back. And so far I have not come up with a single reason to abandon Play Music and return to the usual scenario - to the Music App, iTunes Radio, Vkontakte playlists. Unless it would be possible to save 49 UAH, but this is some kind of frivolous weak argument.
Google play music
P.S. Google has taken care of a convenient tool for transferring music from iTunes to Play Music. Very true move.
Google Play Music is an excellent service for storing music, containing up to 50 thousand user tracks. Its only drawback is playing songs exclusively through a web browser. Google Play Music Desktop Player is designed to solve this problem. The application allows you to play tracks without a browser, quickly find the necessary works by various criteria, and even scribble Last.fm.
Capabilities:
- playback of all songs added to the Play Music service;
- playlist support;
- function of automatic selection of tracks;
- last.fm scrobbling
- song change notifications.
Principle of operation:
immediately after launch, the utility will offer to connect your account in Google Media Library. After authorization, all purchased tracks, as well as downloaded music files, will be available. To add your own songs to the collection, use the Download Manager program.
The player’s interface is similar to the web version of the service. Thanks to Russian localization, dealing with capabilities is very simple. Let's pay attention to an interesting function of automatic selection of tracks based on the composition being played. To create an automatic playlist during song playback, click on the icon in the form of three vertical dots and select "Enable Automix".
Pros:
- special function of the mini-player;
- control via hot keys;
- hTML5 Audio standard support;
- interface in Russian;
- there are versions for Linux and MacOS.
Minuses:
- the player is not suitable for playing local tracks;
- no equalizer.
Google Play Music Desktop Player, or GPMDP for short, is a great tool for playing the Google Play Music music collection without a browser. The program has enough functions for comfortable listening to tracks.
Analogs:
- Tomahawk - a powerful audio player that allows you to listen to the latest music industry;
- AIMP is a functional player with an “easy” interface.
In Russia. For 169 rubles a month you can get full access. The problem is that Google provides the ability to listen to music only either from mobile devices or through a browser.
However, this does not suit many, for example, to me. Therefore, in this article we will consider possible “unofficial” ways to listen to music from Google Play Music.
So, we have Raspberry Pi with an installed MPD server. We want to be able to remotely play any music from our library in Google Play Music on this Raspberry Pi.
We are not considering the option of starting a vnc server with a browser running. I tried to run chromium and midori without an X server and a window manager, anyway this thing is very slow. The music.google.com web application is still quite heavy.
There is no official API for Google Play Music, but on github "e there is an excellent Unofficial-Google-Music-API written in Python. The author of this API, Simon Weber, advises several projects using its API. Let's consider the ones that interest me:
In addition to these projects, you can also find:
It is worth noting that all projects are written in Python. Below I will describe my experience with each of these projects.
thunner
Curses client. Launches music through mplayer. Sounds great but doesn't work. To begin with, I had to switch to a branch that was modified to work with the latest version of the API; the version from master is inoperative. But the music still plays only a second, then switches to the next song. Actually, we can observe the following unresolved issue of All-Access Songs Not Playing, which means it's not just me.GMusicFS
FUSE file system. When mounting, we get a hierarchy of directories for our music library from Google Play Music in artists / formatAccording to the author, this solution is suitable only for copying files to your computer or for playback with a simple player such as mplayer. When trying to play in more advanced players, problems may occur. And indeed, when you try to open a collection even in a simple mocp, it starts to hang very much, it is impossible to listen to music. When trying to specify the directory as a library for MPD, we get the opportunity to listen to music, however, the tags did not load, and listening to songs with the same name “Unknown” is certainly not an option. The author also notes the lack of the ability to play the song from a specific position.
You can install GMusicFS using pip, pre-installing the dependencies:
pip install github.com/terencehonles/fusepy/tarball/master
pip install github.com/simon-weber/Unofficial-Google-Music-API/tarball/develop
pip install github.com/EnigmaCurry/GMusicFS/tarball/master
Then you need to create the ~ / .gmusicfs configuration file with the following contents:
username \u003d [email protected]
password \u003d your_password
And you can mount:
mkdir -p $ HOME / google_music
gmusicfs $ HOME / google_music
To unmount:
fusermount -u $ HOME / google_music
When copying music to your computer, all tags are loaded correctly. Playback using mplayer also works fine. After updating the music library, you must remount the file system.
GMusicProxy
The project description says the following: "Let" s stream Google Play Music using any media-player. "This script allows you to receive m3u playlists or mp3 files by sending specially formed GET requests.
You can install the following command:
pip install github.com/diraimondo/gmusicproxy/tarball/master
To work, you need the device-id of one of the registered devices. You can get a list of these devices as follows:
GMusicProxy --email<адрес> --password<пароль> --list-devices
Create the ~ / .config / gmusicproxy.cfg config:
email \u003d [email protected]
password \u003d my-secret-password
device-id \u003d 54bbd32a309a34ef
We launch:
Usage examples using the mpc console client
curl -s "http: // localhost: 9999 / get_by_search? type \u003d album & artist \u003d Queen & title \u003d Greatest% 20Hits"\u003e
/var/lib/mpd/playlists/queen.m3u
mpc load queen
mpc play
Mpc clear
curl -s "http: // localhost: 9999 / get_new_station_by_search? type \u003d artist & artist \u003d Queen & num_tracks \u003d 100" |
grep -v ^ # | while read url; do mpc add "$ url"; done
mpc play
Case Studies Using VLC
vlc "http: // localhost: 9999 / get_by_search? type \u003d album & artist \u003d Rolling% 20Stones & title \u003d tattoo & exact \u003d no"
curl -s "http: // localhost: 9999 / get_all_stations? format \u003d text & only_url \u003d yes" | sort -R | head -n1 | vlc -
A variety of queries are supported: receiving songs, radio stations, playlists, ...
Of the minuses, it is worth noting that all these requests must be made up by yourself, and also that tags are loaded only when playing a specific song.
play-pi
Django web frontend for accessing the music library with MPD integration. I can only say that I had the same problem as with thunner "ohm - only a second is reproduced.Cantata unfortunately does not connect.
conclusions
To copy music from Google Play Music in mp3 format is perfect. For playback, you can use it with the plugin.I settled on running MPD and Mopidy on different ports at the same time and connecting with different clients (Cantata and GMPC). MPD for local collection, Mopidy for Google Play Music.
Do not forget that when using two-factor authentication, you must create application passwords in the settings of your Google account.
