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One of Google Music’s aim-squarely-at-Apple features is ‘Scan and Match‘, which does what it says on the tin. Just like Apple’s £22-a-year iTunes Match, it scans your music library and matches it with Google’s own library, giving you instant streaming access for free. Well, now it’s meant to be working, and what’s more, it apparently scans any music you’ve already uploaded to Google too.
I can’t say I’ve noticed it working for my tracks, but then I have most of my music uploaded already, so Google’s probably working its magic server-side. Anyway, now it’s officially rolled out in the US as well, which means it should be working here too. One up for Google, and if you’re on and iPhone, you can still grab it, either through the browser or an app like GoMusic. Got to love free stuff, especially at this rather-expensive time of the year. [Google Play]
google music has given my music a new lease of life, i have it all stored on hard drives and i rarely put a cd on these days
but now every day i have music playing
currently have 146 albums uploaded and uploading more as i tag them correctly each day
I love Google Music. I wouldn’t want to pay for any other service that provides what I view to be less value.
However, the 1,000 song limit to a playlist is a crippling artificial limit that needs addressed.
I have no problems with the 20,000 song upload limit, but the playlist limit is a stupid way of limiting the music I can listen to. I have quite a variance of music styles in my uploaded collection, so it wouldn’t be worth it to just let Google select a random selection of everything (though this is -still- limited to just 1,000 songs, which is still poor).
I’d be prepared to -pay- to have this limit removed, it’s that big a problem for me, but it is something that should be dealt with one way or another.
Ok Im a bit lost here. Is it scanning the music on your hard drive and matching it to their own library and then you can play said tunes through GM anywhere without uploading? Sorry if its a dumb question.
No, not a dumb question at all. You’re right about how it works, if it can’t match something you’ve got it uploads it so you can still access it anywhere.
Yup. That’s it. There is no need to upload the files if Google already has versions in their play store.
The Google Music app (whatever it is called) checks into the tags of your file, checks it against the Google Play db. If a valid file is there, it skips it, otherwise it will load it up.
The great thing about this, is if you have files that are substandard (ie 128kbit/s or worse!!), the Matched files are in 320kbit/s, so you get great quality in return.
Ahh fantastic, cheers chaps!
Do you happen to know how well the matching works and its criteria. I have a lot of music but a lot of it is from rips that I got online rather than ripping my own CDs as I discovered once I got decent broadband it took significantly less time to download rips done by someone who knows what they are doing and has tagged them properly than do it myself.
But that leads to my problem that a lot of my tracks other than the oldest are actually from scene releases. Which is actually legal as far as I know under UK law but I don’t know if google will make that differentiation and it really isn’t worth spending the time ripping CDs as it will take days and days even working non stop.
I think it is a mix of file name and mp3 tags. If your tags are good (most scene releases are), then you should have no problem with scan and match.
Google cannot tell if your files are legal or not, so upload away.
However, a lot of scene releases will have notes in the comment tag of the file boasting their endeavour, so it might be a good idea to use MP3tag (free tagging tool) to remove these, just in case…
You can always upload a few albums and see how it goes, then delete them again after testing if you find it’s not for you. The tool supplied by Google is pretty easy to use.
Cheers, will give it a go. Most of the scene tags are gone from my last big reorganisation but I still have a few that need done. I hope it works I just got a nexus 4 and getting Google music working on it would be great.
‘Scan and Match’ – I thought you had to uploaded you music files to Google Music rather than simply scanning your music folders for info?
Oh, I see. Scan and Match is a new feature released today.
Can it Scan and Match CD’s?
No. You music needs to be one of these supported audio formats
mp3 .mp3 supported
aac .m4a supported
wma .wma supported
FLAC .flac supported
ogg .ogg supported
* wma files are only supported by the Windows version of the Google Play Music Manager.
** FLAC, ogg, and aac files are transcoded to 320kbps mp3
http://support.google.com/googleplay/bin/answer.py?hl=en&topic=2450455&ctx=topic&answer=1100462
It comes to something when it’s easier and cheaper for me to upload 30GB of music from my PC upstairs to a server (probably in the States) and then stream it all the way back via wifi through my phone to listen to it on my hifi downstairs than it is to buy/use something like a Sonos.
Scan and Match has launched in the US? This should be the featured item at the top of Gizmodo! This is BIG news! Hurrah!
For all of us overzealous types who connected to google music before it was officially launched in the UK, we should in theory now be able to use scan and match. This will actually improve the quality of my life.
I uploaded all my music to Google Music when it launched in the UK and the match idea is great, but I’ve found that a lot of my music has been replaced by clean versions of the song. Very annoying when half your collection is hip hop! Also a few remixes have been replaced with the originals despite being tagged clearly as a remix.