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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.
Isn't that a bit ogg?
HODOR?
I have to wait till its available in Australia :'(
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.
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.
It looks like it's not actually a real port of the music manager, rather a Wine port with their wrapper stuff, like Picasa.
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.
sic transit gloria mundi
You can't just OGG into HODOR.
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.
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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Yes, but unless you are a musician storing unpublished music, all the music you upload is already public anyway.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.
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
Yeah, just look at how big a failure the Wii was.
Oh I'm sorry, you probably follow all the licensing terms of your music to the letter. Nevermind.
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.
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.)
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.
To be honest, anyone who uploads something to this service that they haven't purchased legally is probably being a bit silly.
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.
Or the KIA automobile. I'll bet they sell a lot of those to combat veterans (not).
Free Martian Whores!
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.
Free Martian Whores!
I hear you. Was kind of interested in Spotify until I tried it, super long gaps. Not impressed!
---- Den ene knappen er powerknapp, den andre er Bender voice knapp "Bite My Shiny Metal Ass"
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.
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 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).
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.
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.
sic transit gloria mundi
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'm glad we find ourselves in agreement.
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.