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Google Music Adds Linux, Ogg Vorbis Support
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."
I just finished uploading my library from Windows yesterday.
HURD?
Isn't that a bit ogg?
I have to wait till its available in Australia :'(
Why do we trust it just because its google?
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
I'd love to try it out, but once again it's only US and we Canadians can't play yet. We're still waiting for Google voice too, although I doubt that's their fault, and more likely related to our telecom providers. Damn nice to see a little Linux love, between this, Adobe's 64 bit flash player, and the supposed support for OnLive coming in the future.
It looks like it's not actually a real port of the music manager, rather a Wine port with their wrapper stuff, like Picasa.
I'd love to use it, but Google will permanently close all my accounts if I violate the Google+ terms-of-service.
And this is why while Google has the evil big brother feeling lately... I can't hate them.
They actually do what they say they are going to do.. which is rare these days.
Props Google.
So far I have 1,916 of 2,828 songs uploaded to Google music.
I'm interested to see how often my phone will need to buffer while in normal use.
HTC EVO 4G LTE w/ CM 10.2 | NookColor w/ CM 10.2 | Samsung Epic 4G w/ CM 10.1
"Ogg", "Vorbis", "PostGre", "Gimp", and we wonder why they don't let geeks name commercial products ;-)
Table-ized A.I.
Go away. Everyone hates you and your piece of shit browser.
That and Unite is free.
I notice that at the bottom of the Google Music page is says:
"Music Beta is available free for a limited time."
Anybody know what the service is going to cost?
you kinda have a point.. ogg vorbis is a terrible name.. oss projects always seem to have stupid or non intuitive names (unless you're a nerd of course).
That's the only thing that might make me consider this.
Actually, I'm joking: even if it did, I wouldn't be interested!
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 if they don't already exist.
You're making us other Anonymous Cowards look like fucking retards. Learn how to troll, punk.
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?
I just pooped your party.
http://xkcd.com/841/
Transcoding lossy formats is always evil. No support is better than propagating generational errors on digital formats.
Give me Classic Slashdot or give me death!
Google's service seems almost perfect -- it does everything I want. But I'm afraid of the music industry getting a judge to force Google to turn over information about people's music files.
Is this a reasonable thing to worry about?
It's used a lot in game development, what with the lack of licencing fees and whatnot.
As for music files... yeah, I don't really see the point, seeing as how many (most?) portable devices don't support it. Just keep your collection in FLAC and convert to mp3 or AAC for your mp3 player.
google needs to convert the Ogg Vorbis files over to MP3, which is neither free nor better. What is the reasoning behind this? Would implementing basic support for Ogg Vorbis be beyond the magical powers of google, or did they have to strike up some evil pact of exclusivity and goat sacrifice with the people who own the MP3 patent in order that their product would have a familiar/attractive format de/compression capability?
Yes, and "MP3" just _slips_ off the tongue.
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 in your open-source OS without even those niggling little abstract worries about paying license fees for the use of MP3 codecs (which technically, you should be doing).
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 a delay in releasing a Linux client.