Google Music Adds Linux, Ogg Vorbis Support 111
luceth writes "According to Android Police, the Google Music library manager now supports Linux! Also available in the Linux upload manager is new support for Ogg Vorbis, though they transcode it to 320 Kbps MP3 like they do with FLAC. Still, it will be nice to get some use out of that beta invite."
Great (Score:1)
Re: (Score:1)
Did you also choose a temperature-dependent bitrate of 320 kelvinbits per seconds?
Re: (Score:2)
HODOR?
Re: (Score:1)
*only* linux? (Score:2)
Isn't that a bit ogg?
Re: (Score:1)
Re: (Score:2)
woosh
oz... (Score:1)
Re: (Score:1)
Try ubuntu one.
Re: (Score:2)
I think I'll wait until hell freezes over. I'll keep my data stored on my own devices; storage is dirt cheap and the storage devices are very small these days. I just don't see any advantage to uploading my music to anybody, especially Google since they yanked my mcgrew@gmail.com address a few years ago with no explanation or recourse; I'd used it to correspond with friends and family, sign up for subscriptions to /. and such but that was all. I'd hate to have half of my music on Google and have it just di
Re: (Score:1)
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:1)
Last.fm and Facebook know what music I like, whereas these cloud services actually have a copy of the music I have. There's a significant difference.
Yes, but unless you are a musician storing unpublished music, all the music you upload is already public anyway. It's exactly the information about what you like which is the sensitive information.
Re: (Score:2)
Oh I'm sorry, you probably follow all the licensing terms of your music to the letter. Nevermind.
Re: (Score:2)
To be honest, anyone who uploads something to this service that they haven't purchased legally is probably being a bit silly.
Re: (Score:2)
Can you prove you got it legally? Hell, most of my CDs are burned from sampled LPs and cassettes.
There's a deliberate joke on Skynard's Second Helping LP that AFAIK is not there on the remixed CD. At the beginning of "Working' for MCA" there's a deliberate bit of noise making fun of the record company; a very quiet "schwing!" followed by a 60 hz (plus harmonics) hum like you would get from a badly shielded cable.
Anything that was originally analog but digitally remixed for CD is crap; at least, what I've he
Re: (Score:2)
Yes, that is the rub - but if I genuinely had a legal copy I'd upload to the service. I doubt it would be in a record label's interest to pursue a court case like that when I can provide hard copies of each album. It's unreasonable (and I think a court would back this up) to expect me to retain the receipt for each CD. Even if the court viewed that suspiciously, there would be thousands of easier targets that would be less expensive and lower risk (for them).
(Of course, being British I believe it's still te
Re: (Score:2)
Yes, that was rather the point.
Re: (Score:2)
I'm glad we find ourselves in agreement.
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
So, what does this do that I can't already do? (Score:2)
One of the easiest things to do is fling music across the net. You can do it with Apache and DynDNS and roll your own or you can do something else.
Rolling my own with Apache is not difficult (I've done it) but is not likely what Joe User is going to do. Opera Unite is drool proof - it even makes a domain service like DynDNS superfluous. Plus it's been running on Linux since forever ago, it seems.
And my music stays put on my own machine at home.
--
BMO
Re: (Score:2)
A lot of NAS appliances offer this too. Some also have dedicated iPhone and Android apps -- though the quality probably varies a lot. Still, I personally find the Google Music app to be subpar on Android. It's gotten a lot better, but worse too in many ways. Some things require too many clicks/taps - and I dont really need a dynamic colored background or the little dropdown context menu. It seems somewhere alone the lines the UI designers forgot they were designing for touchscreens. /endramble
Re: (Score:3)
>setup and hassle.
Have you ever set up Opera Unite?
It's about as easy as falling off a log. Really. I don't know how anyone can make it any easier. You turn it on, create a name for yourself, and point it at your music directory, and boom, you're done. It even penetrates firewalls like Skype. You don't even have to open ports or anything.
It is the best, by far, ad-hoc "server" software going.
You should try it.
Uploading gigabytes of music to a cloud server is orders of magnitude more difficult and ti
Re: (Score:1)
Then you're just stupid.
Thank you for playing the Twit Olympics. Here's your pistol.
--
BMO
Re:So, what does this do that I can't already do? (Score:4, Insightful)
Mind if I ask what possible reason you could have for being anti-Opera?
They're a good company, and are pretty close to acheiving the "do no evil" motto of another company that likes to walk on the border of questionable morality, but never cross it.
The only possible thing I can conceivable come up with is that they are not open source and don't seem to contribute to OS projects. To that I can only shrug. They've had a linux client for years. I've been using linux long enough to remember when opera was a probably the best browser in the repos. (still is if you're on an older system).
They have a mobile browser that works across all mobile operating systems, including maemo. And not just some desktop knock off that strains resources, but one with a small footprint. Webpages can be run through their own proxies that convert normal webpages into mobile friendly versions to minimize mobile bandwidth costs. They even made browsers for the Nintendo ds and wii.
Supporting so many platforms is a huge feat that not even google can boast of. Opera is a pretty cool company, in my opinion. They can keep their source code.
Re:So, what does this do that I can't already do? (Score:5, Interesting)
Re: (Score:1)
All right, but apart from a browser that is lightweight, innovative, portable - both for mobile platforms and Linux -, comes with an embedded webserver, tons of extensions, and has a high score on the acid test, what have Opera Software ever done for us?
Re: (Score:2)
Taking your stuff and selling it back to you has been the model for every big business since the '80s. Whether it's privatising industry, spectrum, or sequences of 0s and 1s, it's essential to create artificial scarcity in order that the powerful retain their rightful position.
Re: (Score:1)
Re: (Score:2)
Is the streaming accessible via iPhone or Android phones?
Re: (Score:2)
iPhone didn't do anything that you couldn't already do with Symbian or WinMo, either (in fact, it still does less in many areas). Didn't stop it from becoming the single best selling smartphone in a very short time.
Borders (Score:4, Informative)
Re: (Score:2)
I'd love to try it out
Why? mp3's are small. Just get yourself a portable player with an 80GB (or larger) hard drive and you'll be set for months of uninterrupted music.
Maybe I'm missing something, but I don't see any practical value to this service. Maybe if it let you stuff blurays into it, that would be something. But just dinky little music files? Especially when it transcodes it to mp3 so you can't ever get the original back out? What good is that?
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:1)
Re: (Score:2)
Nothing is subpar compared to 64kbps MP3s.
Personally, I don't carry an MP3 player for the same reason I also don't carry a camera, watch, address book, PDA and handheld GPS: convenience.
On the other hand, I don't stream; I just got a big microSD card and I sync using Wifi. But for people with large music libraries, streaming is probably cheaper.
Re: (Score:1)
It's much better to run down the battery in my MP3 player than my phone. It's much better if I damage or lose my MP3 player than my phone. It's much better to listen to music on my MP3 player because no phone has sound quality like it.
The same things apply for my camera, only for images instead of music.
Looking at a watch is vastly more convenient than having to break out the phone whenever I need
Re: (Score:1)
I used to be in the "I want my phone to just be a phone" camp.
Now I have an Android smartphone. I generally get ~24 hours out of it between charges, though I plug it in every night. Playing music with it consumes almost no battery - optimized hardware decode paths and all that. I can play music for a couple hours and still be at 80-90% battery - which is enough to last me until the next morning, if need be.
I wouldn't call it a "sub par" player, either, I don't know why that is assumed. It has all the us
Re: (Score:2)
I'm getting right around 13 hours on my phone with 9-10 of that being google music streaming. I can do the same battery tiimes with slacker as well. Also since I sit at my desk mostly all day, i could always plug my phone into the computer to charge it if i wanted.
I've dropped point and shoot cameras for everything outside of camping for my cell, my watch is also my cell, my mp3 player too.
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
64kbps??? that is telephone quality maybe.
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
i too have a sandisk 512mb player somewhere buried. it still works, but now my phone has an 8gb microsd card, so...
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
I prefer my Sansa Fuze 8GB (with an 8GB expansion card), which is only 0.3" thick.
Re: (Score:2)
I have limited upstream bandwidth (abour 32kBs before other things slow down), most of the solutions I have seen have no way to control the rate at which they consume bandwidth from the server. Also there is no way i could host 2-3 devices at the same time with a home grown solution.
In my own home, I stream locally over NFS/CIFS and it works great, but for outside my home i'm better off letting google handle the bandwidth.
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
There. Fixed that for you.
It's a Wine port (Score:1)
It looks like it's not actually a real port of the music manager, rather a Wine port with their wrapper stuff, like Picasa.
Re: (Score:2)
As long as it's tested and supported (well, Google levels of support, which aren't exactly great), who cares?
Although I do use the Windows version of Picasa with Wine instead of the version wrapped by Google, but that's because they're lagging the versions behind (the Linux 'port' still doesn't support facial recognition).
No, it's definitely Linux native (Score:2)
It's a small package, with no dependencies on Wine, only on packages that I already had installed on Ubuntu 11.04 64-bit. It works quite smoothly. The only hitch is that it tries to use the notification area, which doesn't exist in Ubuntu 11.04's Unity interface.
Google offers a number of applications for Linux, and has repositories for current versions of Ubuntu. Google claims to use OS X and their own rebranded version of Google internally more than they use Windows, so it's only surprising that there was
Giving it a try. (Score:2)
I'm interested to see how often my phone will need to buffer while in normal use.
Re: (Score:2)
Turning on WiFi on the phone, it works perfectly, with only about 5-10 seconds pause at the start
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
They already know of this. Google asked them for a license on reasonable terms, but eventually gave up (on "reasonable"). Sometimes I wonder if that Google engineer who flipped the "go online" key did it with his middle finger.
Re: (Score:1)
Re: (Score:2)
Or the KIA automobile. I'll bet they sell a lot of those to combat veterans (not).
Does it do gapless? (Score:1)
Actually, I'm joking: even if it did, I wouldn't be interested!
Re: (Score:2)
I hear you. Was kind of interested in Spotify until I tried it, super long gaps. Not impressed!
What's so special? (Score:1)
What's so special about google music compared to something like grooveshark?
I could already upload all my music to grooveshark and listen to it from any computer and there is also a mobile app for devices that don't support flash like the iPhone and iPad.
What makes grooveshark better than google music IMO is that with grooveshark you don't even need to upload much of your music because it's already all there since you essentially have access to everyone's uploaded tracks. But you can still upload your own i
Re: (Score:2)
Grooveshark's business model appears to be based on blatantly infringing copyright, then hoping they can negotiate deals with the record labels. Google Music is based on doing something that probably isn't copyright infringement (although the RIAA may disagree), backed up by Google's lawyers. I like Grooveshark, but I don't know that it's going to be around for very long.
OGG = MP3 (Score:2)
If I recall correctly, OGG and MP3 use very different (lossy) compression techniques. As a result, converting from one to the other will drop audio quality substantially.
What's the point of providing a feature that will, in all likelihood, make your music sound bad?
Re: (Score:1)
If I recall correctly, OGG and MP3 use very different (lossy) compression techniques.
That is true.
As a result, converting from one to the other will drop audio quality substantially.
That is false. Converting to any lossy format causes a change from the original source, of course, but there's no reason why it becomes magically worse in these circumstances. You'll see about the same amount of change on average regardless of whether the starting waveform was direct from a ADC, from an MP3 decoder, from an OGG decoder, or whatever. Whether that constitutes a "drop in audio quality" is debatable -- sometimes its actually an improvement, but then "audio quality" is a bit subj
Re: (Score:2)
Both OGG and MP3 lossy compression techniques work by sacrificing aspects of the original waveform that often go unnoticed by the human ear. Some approaches even take advantage of what's considered the auditory equivalent of optical illusions, removing large chucks of audio information which, due to how the human ear and brain processes audio, go by almost completely unnoticed. It's actually pretty cool :)
My point is, from what I read a couple of years ago, many of the more ambitions compression technique
Re: (Score:2)
lol, I just noticied that my thread title has been sanitized to OGG = MP3!
It's supposed to be OGG <=> MP3.
Re: (Score:2)
If I recall correctly, OGG and MP3 use very different (lossy) compression techniques. As a result, converting from one to the other will drop audio quality substantially.
What's the point of providing a feature that will, in all likelihood, make your music sound bad?
You will not be able to tell the difference on your cell phone earbuds, which seems to be the target use of Google Music.
You probably would not be able to tell the difference on a $5,000 home audio system either, but whatever.
Re: (Score:2)
And even sillier, it's not necessary - Android plays Vorbis just fine...
Re: (Score:1)
Do no evil? (Score:3)
Transcoding lossy formats is always evil. No support is better than propagating generational errors on digital formats.
Re: (Score:2)
Well, they might have found out how to do the conversion in an information-preserving way.
There are some smart people at google, you know...
Re: (Score:2)
This is Google we're talking about. This service must have thousands of users already, if not tens of thousands; the numbers will be multiplied many times over when it's a fully open beta, and more when it's fully released.
So what's the RIAA going to do? Subpoena the music lists for all the tens or hundreds of thousands of users, and send investigators to each home, to check whether there's a CD for each album, or a record of a download license from Amazon or eMusic or iTunes or some other service? Even in
I don't understand why... (Score:1)
Re: (Score:2)
Yes, and "MP3" just _slips_ off the tongue.
Re: (Score:2)
Vorbis produces a superior sounding encode at lower bitrates than MP3.
Manufacturers that support it in their players also tend to be more attentive to the needs of their more technical users. iOS doesn't have native Vorbis support ; Android does. Samsung supports it in their YP range. iRiver support it (and their players tend to have excellent audio quality too). So it's something of an interesting litmus test of the general tech-savvy of a given manufacturer.
And being a patent-free codec, you can use it i