So I’ve had my Google Music account set up for a couple of weeks now. Here’s what I’ve run into so far. I’ve also got a couple of bugfixes and notes for you. I’m wondering if anybody else has experimented with it yet? If so, what do you think? Drop me a comment and let me know!

If you don’t know what Google Music is, check out the site. It’s currently in beta, so it’s not publicly available yet. But I visited there site to request an invite, and had one just a few days later. The idea behind the site is that you upload your music, and have it available anywhere. You can get to your music from any computer, or from your phone (at least Android phone). It’s currently free, not sure what the future plans are as far as that goes. They also allow you to upload something like 10000 songs to your account.

The cool thing about Google Music, is that it is available to Google Apps users. If you don’t use apps, you wouldn’t understand my surprise. But Google seems to always make new features available to apps users last! As of right now, I still can’t make a google profile, or sign up for Google+ using my normal @rvoodoo.com account. I’m still having to use my old retired gmail account.

Anyway, on to what I learned. The first thing I did was sign up, and upload some music. I picked out a few thousand of my favourite tracks and upped them. Google Music offers a handy uploader which will sync a folder with your account. Now those of you who know me know that a 10000 song limit barely scratches the music I have. So I had to pick a few thousand to test, and put them in my folder. It took a few days, but everything uploaded. Anything new I drop into my assigned folder automatically goes onto Google Music, so that’s handy.

The next thing I did while waiting for my music to upload was install the Google Music app on my Android phone. Here’s where I had my first issue. It took me a while to get things working. The app installed no problem, but only found music local to my phone. It simply would not sync. I uninstalled and reinstalled numerous times. I finally figured out what works for me. Install the app. Then go to your phone’s main setting screen (not Google Music’s settings, your phone’s). From there go to Applications, and in applications go to Manage applications. From tha manage screen go to the Google Music app (It’s just called music in the menu), open it up and force stop if necessary, and the clear data. Once you’ve done that, you can open up the actual Google Music app, and go to settings, and select which account to sync to. After I did that, everything worked.

That brings me to the secong issue I had. Nothing would play. For days I could see my music, but nothing would play. Maybe twice songs played, but only one, then the app would lock up. Nothing worked correctly, and I hated the app. Well, here’s what fixed that. Wait until all of your music has uploaded! That simple! As long as I had any music still uploading to my account, the app wouldn’t work right. As soon as everything was finished uploading, the app works like a champ! I’m starting to dig it!

So what’s it like? Well, here’s a big issue I’m having. A lot of my DJ mixes don’t have proper ID3 tagging on them. If your music isn’t tagged properly, it won’t sort properly in your Google Music account. So I’ve had to spend a lot of time organiaing stuff. Editing artist, song, and album info. If you want your music to be properly sorted and easy to use, make sure your ID3 tags are good, or deal with it once it’s uploaded, whatever works. You can see the actual file name on the website, so that helped me sort things.

I’m not sure how much I’m going to use this yet. It seems real cool right now, but I don’t know how much I’ll use it in the future. Have any of you tried it yet? What do you think? Is it working well for you? I’m curious to hear your experiences, and your plans.