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."

Comments

Great

[flibby]

I just finished uploading my library from Windows yesterday.

Re:Great

[Anonymous Coward]

Did you also choose a temperature-dependent bitrate of 320 kelvinbits per seconds?

Yes, but does it support

[Anonymous Coward]

HURD?

Re:Yes, but does it support

[RicardoGCE]

HODOR?

Re:Yes, but does it support

[Anonymous Coward]

You can't just OGG into HODOR.

*only* linux?

[havardi]

Isn't that a bit ogg?

Re:*only* linux?

[wesleyjconnor]

wouldnt this be for its imminent release on android...

Re:*only* linux?

[mcgrew]

woosh

oz...

[johnsnails]

I have to wait till its available in Australia :'(

Re:oz...

[AvitarX]

Try ubuntu one.

Re:oz...

[mcgrew]

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 disappear.

After the gmail debacle I no longer trust Google. Yeah, I have a G+ account but no way will I not have my pictures stored locally.

Cloud?

[Anonymous Coward]

Why do we trust it just because its google?

Re:Cloud?

[IB4Student]

You have issues with the Internet knowing what music you have? Lots of people spend the time to add their favorite musicians or tracks to Facebook, Last.fm, P2P, etc.

Re:Cloud?

[glwtta]

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.

Re:Cloud?

[maxwell demon]

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Yes, but unless you are a musician storing unpublished music, all the music you upload is already public anyway.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:Cloud?

[martin-boundary]

Except that the RIAA goons can now ask the cloud for a list of what you have rather than a list of what you like. Apparently, possession is 9/10ths of the law and all that...

Oh I'm sorry, you probably follow all the licensing terms of your music to the letter. Nevermind.

Re:Cloud?

[kevinmenzel]

I love being a fringe case! (Though I suppose the ratio of published to unpublished works in my music library is pretty small. or big. whichever means I have lots of published music.)

Re:Cloud?

[boristhespider]

To be honest, anyone who uploads something to this service that they haven't purchased legally is probably being a bit silly.

Re:Cloud?

[mcgrew]

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 heard so far. Boston's 1st album and Zeppelin's Presence are especially bad. Ironically the CDs lack dynamics, even though CDs have better dynamic range. An LP you sample and burn yourself will sound better than the remixed CD.

If I uploaded my legally purchased analog music I'd be getting letters from lawyers.

Re:Cloud?

[boristhespider]

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 technically illegal for me to format-shift, but the labels are on record as saying they won't prosecute for that. I may be behind the times and this may finally have changed; I know it was being discussed quite recently.)

REM did something similar on Reckoning, as I recall -- there's a little section of music at the end of my (unfortunately long expired) cassette copy just after Little America which isn't on the CD I've got. I kind of regret not copying that across before the tape died...

Anyway, personally I think you'd be fine uploading things transcoded from LPs and cassettes - but hell, I'm not a lawyer, and the record labels have proven themselves unpleasant and vindictive.

Re:Cloud?

[WorBlux]

You've applied that maxim incorrectly. Possession is 9/10ths of the law, because whoever the possessor is, is presumed to be the rightful owner.

Re:Cloud?

[glwtta]

To be honest, anyone who uploads something to this service that they haven't purchased legally is probably being a bit silly.

Yes, that was rather the point.

Re:Cloud?

[boristhespider]

I'm glad we find ourselves in agreement.

So, what does this do that I can't already do?

[bmo]

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:So, what does this do that I can't already do?

[alostpacket]

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:So, what does this do that I can't already do?

[Anonymous Coward]

obviously not aimed at you. not everyone wants to keep their pc on 24/7(electricity cost for one issue) not to mention setup and hassle.

Re:So, what does this do that I can't already do?

[guantamanera]

yo do not even need to roll your own. Just use Ampache, and host it yourself. There are Android and boxee clients. I no longer use satellite radio since I stream everything to my phone for long drives..

Re:So, what does this do that I can't already do?

[bmo]

>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 time consuming simply because you have to decide what music you can do without (google doesn't give you unlimited free space).

--
BMO

Re:So, what does this do that I can't already do?

[Anonymous Coward]

It has the Opera label, so that means I'm not going to try it. Kinda like iTunes.

Re:So, what does this do that I can't already do?

[bmo]

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?

[Anonymous Coward]

Computers can be turned off? Citation needed.

Re:So, what does this do that I can't already do?

[Anonymous Coward]

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?

[creativeHavoc]

Well said. They also dislike software patents, and their dragonfly (developer tools) project is open source https://bitbucket.org/scope/dragonfly-stp-1

Re:So, what does this do that I can't already do?

[Anonymous Coward]

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:So, what does this do that I can't already do?

[Sepodati]

Is the streaming accessible via iPhone or Android phones?

Re:So, what does this do that I can't already do?

[Anonymous Coward]

What this does that your system doesn't currently do is:

Share information about what you listen to, with other parties who can correlate it with other things you do, to show you better-targeted ads at the right time.

Show you ads as you use the service.

Re:So, what does this do that I can't already do?

[Anonymous Coward]

You don't need to be a no-life basement nerd to use it. That's the difference between your apache box at home and Google Music,

Re:So, what does this do that I can't already do?

[Anonymous Coward]

So what is the best way to do this? I have Apache and DynDNS on my PC and I have many thousands of songs there in the served directory. I've used batch files to auto-generate M3U's for each directory. But this really sucks if you have more than 100 songs. And many media players do not like serving up these over HTTPS password protected Apache using self signed certs.

I've played with various open source media servers, but they have all been flaky at best and none serve up my protected iTunes. Many have problems with various codecs I have used over the years.

I have Google Music and it's ok. I like Amazon Cloud Player better, but it's not great either. I am hoping cloud gets this segment right. It is long overdue.

Re:So, what does this do that I can't already do?

[shutdown -p now]

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.

Re:So, what does this do that I can't already do?

[Anonymous Coward]

Google Music streams and/or downloads to your Android.

Re:So, what does this do that I can't already do?

[Anonymous Coward]

> It's gotten a lot better

Here on Earth we usually say "it has improved".

Borders

[Nerdfest]

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.

Re:Borders

[Jah-Wren Ryel]

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:Borders

[Anonymous Coward]

I'll stick to Spotify for now.

Re:Borders

[brentrad]

Practical value: Access to your entire music collection on your Android phone, your Android tablet, and anywhere you can open a web browser, all without having to remember to upload the files to each device individually (or taking up the precious limited space on your phone or tablet.) I have an iPod with plenty of space for most of my collection, but if the battery dies or I forget it, I have a backup plan if I want to listen to music (it's happened to me recently, and it was nice to have that backup.) And then if you get a new album, you only have to add it to your collection once, you don't have to remember to upload it to multiple devices.

Remember that Google doesn't sell mp3 players. For you, with an mp3 player with a large capacity, this isn't as useful. But for someone without an iPod, but who has an Android phone, Google Music Beta could easily replace the need for them to buy an iPod. This service is a direct competitor to Apple's iPod business.

Being able to access your collection from multiple devices from anywhere with an internet connection is the major draw of Google Music Beta. I'm still trying it out and deciding if it's awesome or just kinda cool, but so far I'm liking it.

Re:Borders

[hairyfeet]

Sooooo let me get this straight. You take your phone, the thing you kinda really need for people to get a hold of you, for emergencies, etc, and run the battery down by using it as an MP3 player, because while you're not too cheap to buy a several hundred dollar Android smartphone you ARE to cheap to buy a $150 MP3 player?

Maybe I'm just weird, because I don't get it. I have a 4Gb Sandisk, gets 27 hours on a single AAA, and at 64Kb (which frankly with all the outside noise when I'm out and about is the best I'm gonna hear) has about 1600 tunes with space left over. Oh and it cost a grand total of $30. If you keep an eye out you can get one of those 30Gb or 80Gb Zune players for around $120.

So why on earth would you want to run down your phone just to use it as a sub par MP3 player?

Re:Borders

[Anonymous Coward]

64kbit mp3s are horrible, fm stereo radio sounds better. 64kbit wma isn't too bad, better then the mp3 at the same bitrate but still pretty horrible. For my personal use, I do either 128kbit+ mp3 or 96kbit+ wma, the higher the better though (up to a point)...

Re:Borders

[Anonymous Coward]

I don't get the point, you can already do this without Google's services, I have a 3TB XP box sitting in my apartment full of FLAC, plus an OpenVPN server on my DD-WRT router. Just connect my tablet to WiFi, open server share, stream lossless FLAC (or copy if bandwidth is low, then play). If you would rather rely on external services it's OK, but I question the legality of uploading music (that may or may not be pirated) to a Google server.

That said, I don't use an iPod (hate Apple, reluctantly use Windows, like Linux) but I did just buy an Archos 43 Internet Tablet, a 4.3" 16GB Android 2.2 based handheld that has WiFi and Bluetooth (not a phone so no 3G/etc). I can't afford a data plan but rarely would need one with all the free WiFi out there. I also run Debian on it when Android doesn't have a compatible app (portable desktop VLC is awesome...).

Re:Borders

[icebraining]

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:Borders

[Anonymous Coward]

Personally, I DO carry an MP3 player for the same reason I also carry a camera and watch: convenience.

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 to know the time.

When someone produces a ruggedized, watch sized smartphone with a holographic, in-air projection display with a professional audio DSP, a better camera than a high-end DSLR and a battery that can power all of the functions for several days, then I'll consider only carrying a phone.

Re:Borders

[Anonymous Coward]

Isn't choice great. Stop forcing your solutions on everyone else.

Re:Borders

[adolf]

Being able to access your collection from multiple devices from anywhere with an internet connection is the major draw of Subsonic . I'm still trying it out and deciding if it's awesome or just kinda cool, but so far I'm liking not having to upload everything to the cloud first.

There. Fixed that for you.

Re:Borders

[Calos]

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 usual library setup, can organize by artist/album/song/etc., create playlists, full library search. It would be nice to have built-in equalizer settings, but I can get that through my ROM - not that I find it necessary to use it, the output sounds fine at stock.

Re:Borders

[Anonymous Coward]

I heard that they only check your location when registrating, so once you've registrated through a proxy you're good to use it anywhere.

Re:Borders

[cynyr]

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:Borders

[cynyr]

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:Borders

[Anonymous Coward]

Even after I got my Android smartphone, I still want my specialised hardware. You might get by with only an hour of music, but I generally listen to over 8 hours of music a day on my MP3 player. That alone would run my battery down to at least half, leaving little left for phone calls, looking things up and GPS.

I've checked out the sound quality on a lot of phones and a lot of MP3 players. None are as good as my player. Hell, many of them don't even support FLAC.

Re:Borders

[brentrad]

Have you never heard of a power plug? You can plug things in, AND listen to them at the same time these days. What will they think of next?

Re:Borders

[brentrad]

Well that's awesome for you then. I, however, don't have a 3TB XP box sitting in my apartment full of FLAC, and the desire to set this all up myself. This service is obviously not for people that like to roll their own.

Re:Borders

[Anonymous Coward]

Are you fucking stupid? The man said he uses it not just on his phone but on his tablet as well. He also mentioned he liked being able to listen anywhere there is a browser he can use. That's a completely different usage scenario than what he will get from an easily lost mp3 player. Basically, you just want to be a negative little troll and make yourself sound stupid by setting up a strawman and arguing against it. You are such a piece of shit.

Re:Borders

[perryizgr8]

64kbps??? that is telephone quality maybe.

Re:Borders

[Anonymous Coward]

Oh, you mean like that guy forcing his solution of smartphone only?

Re:Borders

[hairyfeet]

Well when I'm using it I'm either out walking (can't jog after getting my knee torn up in a bike wreck) or doing a service call and in those situations I have so much background noise and other crap that frankly anything higher is just being wasted.

Now at home? That is a completely different story. I have everything in 320k either running to my cans or to my old 80s stereo through the aux input but sadly since moving into my apt I don't get to blast the big old Pioneer anymore and will probably end up giving it to the oldest boy to hook up to his PC.

But for me the selling point was AAA battery power because when I had one that ran on LiON I always ended up with the damned thing going dead at the absolute WORST possible time. I'd forget to charge it, or I'd be out longer than I planned, it was just a PITA. Sadly I can't find any bigger than 4Gb that run on a AAA, but I may end up just switching to 128k anyway as I've found out of the 1600 tunes I have on the thing I usually only listen to the hard rock stuff which I could easily have in 128k with room left over.

But I really can't complain as I've had nothing but goodness from these Sandisk E series players. I have had 3, I started with 512Mb then went to 1Gb and finally 4Gb and all three are still working beautifully even after nearly 7 years. They've been sat on, left in a hot car, used and abused and the things just keep working year after year. My LiON powered player lasted about a year and a half then it was shot. Maybe I'm weird but I just can't get into the whole disposable gear thing.

Re:Borders

[perryizgr8]

i too have a sandisk 512mb player somewhere buried. it still works, but now my phone has an 8gb microsd card, so...

Re:Borders

[hairyfeet]

The problem I have with the phone players is I always seem to end up in an "either or" problem. it is 3AM, I just got the gear packed away after doing a great show at the club, I need to wander around the streets to burn off some of this energy and ...crap. My phone has like 12% charge. I can either listen to tunes and not have a phone when it dies, or have a phone and not listen to tunes.

With the Sandisk I just walk into the corner gas station and say "Hey where are the AAA batteries at?" and most of the little gas stations around here have what they call "battery jars" where they have a mix of sizes by the counter and you can just buy a single battery if that is all you need. I hand them 75c or whatever it is and I'm bopping out the doors to my tunes.

Maybe you are just more anal about charging things, who knows. I always seem to have half a dozen things going at the same time and it slips my mind. Hell even as I type this I have two more boxes on the KVM, one is getting patches after a wipe and reinstall and the other is an old socket 478 P4 I put together cheap for this grandma who needs a box for her grandkids so they can chat cause the kids live halfway across the state and its currently having XP Home put on it. My ex said 'I don't know how you can even think with so much going on" but for me anything less than 3 things at once just ain't normal.

So I'll stick with old faithful, at least until I find someplace that builds a 16Gb flash based with user replaceable batteries.

Re:Borders

[WuphonsReach]

Eh, as nice as the AA/AAA battery devices are - they fall down in the "thin" department, which makes a big difference.

I prefer my Sansa Fuze 8GB (with an 8GB expansion card), which is only 0.3" thick.

It's a Wine port

[Megatog615]

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:It's a Wine port

[icebraining]

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).

Re:It's a Wine port

[Anonymous Coward]

I don't think so. It uses qt library. Besides, how hard is it to write a native uploader, sheesh. They don't need to do a silly port for something so trivial.

OGG VORBIS IS WHAT GF SAYS WHEN SHE BARFS !!

[Anonymous Coward]

And if you ever see her barf, you know why !!

Re:OGG VORBIS IS WHAT GF SAYS WHEN SHE BARFS !!

[Anonymous Coward]

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).

Re:OGG VORBIS IS WHAT GF SAYS WHEN SHE BARFS !!

[Dr_Barnowl]

Yes, and "MP3" just _slips_ off the tongue.

That was a really good post.

[nathancom]

That was a really good post. You made some exceptional points and I am grateful for your insight! Thanks Again seo company http://www.nathansaputra.info/

Yeah, but

[Anonymous Coward]

I'd love to use it, but Google will permanently close all my accounts if I violate the Google+ terms-of-service.

Awesome sauce

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Giving it a try.

[basotl]

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.

Re:Giving it a try.

[brentrad]

I've only really tried it a couple times, but: In my house where I don't get that great a 3G signal, I had a hard time getting a whole song to actually play (buffering...buffering.) Granted that was not too long after it launched. Tried it again just now, and seemed to work great, downloaded a whole 3:20 song in about 30 seconds and had no pauses. Only two points of data, but take it for what it's worth. :)

Turning on WiFi on the phone, it works perfectly, with only about 5-10 seconds pause at the start of playing while it started streaming.

Re:Giving it a try.

[houghi]

Once the MAFIAA gets hold of this, a buffering phone is the least of your worries.

Re:Giving it a try.

[shutdown -p now]

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.

A rose is a woody perennial of the genus Rosa

[Tablizer]

"Ogg", "Vorbis", "PostGre", "Gimp", and we wonder why they don't let geeks name commercial products ;-)

Re:A rose is a woody perennial of the genus Rosa

[WelshRarebit]

Yeah, just look at how big a failure the Wii was.

Re:A rose is a woody perennial of the genus Rosa

[mcgrew]

Or the KIA automobile. I'll bet they sell a lot of those to combat veterans (not).

dsadsa

[Anonymous Coward]

Negozio online offre le ultime louis vuitton borse , louis vuitton outlet , pi?se di Louis Vuitton borse sono fino al 60% di sconto, trovare le migliori offerte di sconto borse di Louis Vuitton qui! Authentic borse Moda quanlity e negozi borse.online di sconto louis vuitton sito ufficiale , borse Louis Vuitton e portafogli, la maggior parte delle borse e portafogli sono fino al 60%./Benvenuto al louis vuitton borse 2011 !

Opera Loser

[Anonymous Coward]

Go away. Everyone hates you and your piece of shit browser.

Does anyone care about OGG outside Slashdot?

[Anonymous Coward]

OGG?!? I have never understood the fixation of some folks on this wrapper: it borders of fetishism. Google Music has zero appeal to me, not that I don't see the value in it but I can manage to carry over 50,000 songs with me in a small package easily enough and the thought of uploading it all is rather uninspiring.

Re:Does anyone care about OGG outside Slashdot?

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:Does anyone care about OGG outside Slashdot?

[Dr_Barnowl]

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).

How much does Google Music Cost?

[Vecanti]

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?

Re:How much does Google Music Cost?

[Hazel Bergeron]

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.

mod uP

[Anonymous Coward]

And a5 BSD sinIks

Does it do gapless?

[ardle]

That's the only thing that might make me consider this.
Actually, I'm joking: even if it did, I wouldn't be interested!

Re:Does it do gapless?

[radish]

I hear you. Was kind of interested in Spotify until I tried it, super long gaps. Not impressed!

What's so special?

[SirMasterboy]

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.

Re:What's so special?

[Homburg]

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.

Re: Loser

[Anonymous Coward]

You're making us other Anonymous Cowards look like fucking retards. Learn how to troll, punk.

OGG = MP3

[Bozzio]

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:OGG = MP3

[osu-neko]

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 subjective.

Re:OGG = MP3

[Bozzio]

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 techniques interfere with one another. A compression technique which plays on auditory illusions will have its illusion completely destroyed by a subsequent compression approach. This is because the subsequent compression is applied not on the perceived audio, but on the encoded audio. It's not the same thing, and it makes combining certain lossy compression techniques seriously degraded the perceived audio quality. And in this case I used 'perceived audio quality' as a judgement of noticeable difference between the original waveform and the compressed and decompressed waveform.

Re:OGG = MP3

[Bozzio]

lol, I just noticied that my thread title has been sanitized to OGG = MP3!

It's supposed to be OGG <=> MP3.

Re:OGG = MP3

[massysett]

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:OGG = MP3

[Dr_Barnowl]

And even sillier, it's not necessary - Android plays Vorbis just fine...

Re:OGG = MP3

[ikirudennis]

While it is a little silly (for multiple reasons) to transcode ogg, in my experience, oggs look more like lossless codecs that just have a more finely tuned filter on low volume sounds. MP3 throws out the high frequency spectrum to lose data, where ogg just throws out low amplitude data. Image compression analogy: mp3 is like changing the image resolution, ogg is like the full scale original just with some of the dark sections set to #000000 instead of something like #010101.

Re:OGG = MP3

[Anonymous Coward]

Are you deaf? Serious question. That's about the only reason I can think off for not hearing the reduction in quality after lossy to lossy transcoding.

Obligatory

[Anonymous Coward]

http://xkcd.com/841/

Do no evil?

[Hatta]

Transcoding lossy formats is always evil. No support is better than propagating generational errors on digital formats.

Re:Do no evil?

[StripedCow]

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:Do no evil?

[Anonymous Coward]

Quite unlikely. The information loss is due to differences in the codecs which you can't get around without changing the codecs and thus making the files incompatible with standard implementations. What they have done is set the MP3 bitrate to its max (320 kbps) which will minimise lost information, it is likely any losses will be imperceptible, but i wouldn't bet on it, there could be some quirks that mean it is.

I'm afraid of intellectual property laws

[Anonymous Coward]

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?

Re:I'm afraid of intellectual property laws

[FoolishOwl]

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 the unlikely event that a judge authorized it, the effort would bankrupt the recording industry.

The RIAA has mostly targetted people who distribute music, and has met with surprisingly little success. Google's service only allows access to the music by the person who uploaded it, so individual users would not be likely targets.

The worst case scenario is that Google cancels the service.

I don't understand why...

[gnawingonfoot]

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?

No, it's definitely Linux native

[FoolishOwl]

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.