If you listened to Show #00027 you heard me go over some of this already but I wanted to dedicate an entire post to comparing the two current cloud-based music services, Amazon’s Cloud Player and Music by Google. Amazon’s is ready and available for everyone and Google’s is still in an invite-only beta. In this four-part write-up I’ll walk you through setting everything up (Part I), using the browser-based players (Part II), the Android apps (Part III) and lastly I’ll wrap up my opinions and look ahead at Apple’s iCloud service (Part IV).

Get your music library ready, check your ISP data cap and let’s get started!

Part I: Ready To Start (Setting Up)

I don’t know about you but I use more than one device to listen to music. My iPod, desktop, laptop, work computer and phone all get used at one point or another to feed my constant craving to have sweet-ass melodies providing a soundtrack for my every move and thought. The biggest problem with this? What if I didn’t put that Bruce bootleg from the ’78 Darkness tour on my phone and I absolutely NEED to hear it? The Cleveland Agora show version of “Jungleland” is transcendent and it’s not on my damn iPod. Luckily with cloud-based music services I can access a whole bunch of my music from virtually anywhere and everything is kept in sync.

Setting up Amazon Cloud Player

I don’t think that getting started using this service could get much easier. Everyone who has an Amazon account is given 5 GB of free storage right off that bat. Right now they are offering free unlimited music storage with the purchase of any Cloud Drive plan. They offer tiered 50, 100, 200, 500 and 1,000 GB plans that will cost you $1/GB per year respectively. If you don’t catch the unlimited music storage offer know that any music you purchase from their store does not count against your storage limit.

To get started head over to their MP3 Store and click on “Amazon Cloud Player” in the top menu:

Alternatively you can purchase any song or album (even the rotating selections that Amazon offers for free) and when checking out you have the option to “Save to your Amazon Cloud Drive”. This will automatically place the music you’ve just acquired into your drive to listen to immediately (you also have the option to download the files to your computer or phone).

The Cloud Drive doesn’t just store the music you’ve purchased from the store, it also allows you to upload your own music directly from your hard drive using the Amazon MP3 Uploader. With this most likely being the first time you’re uploading music you’ll have to download the small Adobe Air-based program that will then automatically scan your iTunes and Windows Media Player libraries for files available to upload. While it’s scanning you do have the option to interrupt the process and manually select a folder for it to scan.

Once the scan is complete you’ll be presented with the option to customize any files, folders or playlists that you want to upload. Conveniently the app keeps track of the total size of what you’ve selected, how much room you’d have left and about how long it will take to upload everything.

At this time the uploader will only recognize DRM-free MP3 (such as those sold by the Amazon MP3 Store) and AAC files (from the iTunes store). WMA and other various formats are not eligible to be uploaded. For the complete list click here.

Once you’ve purchased some music or your uploads complete you’re all set to start listening, which we’ll get to in Part II.

Setting Up Google Music Beta

The first thing you’ll need to set this up is an invite to the beta, which you can request here. I was lucky enough to be invited in one of the early batches that went out but now all of you will know exactly what to do when you do get in on this hot action.

Once you’re all signed up for the service they’ll have you download their Music Manager, which handles the uploading of your files. This program handles automatically scanning your music libraries much like Amazon’s version but you don’t have the option of selecting or de-selecting  individual files as clearly as Amazon’s Uploader though you can point it towards a particular folder on your hard drive. The app just starts uploading your music on its own, very slowly. It took approximately a week or so for the 20,000 files to finish uploading. Granted, that’s a metric shit ton of music, but like we said on the podcast, we’d rather have the bandwidth available for playing the music.

From what I can tell there is no particular GB size set for what you can upload, it’s simply limited to 20,000 songs. If you’re like me and have an obnoxiously large music library of over 40,000 songs, you can’t upload everything but they’re still giving away a whole lot of space for free (for now, no word on if or what they’ll charge once Music is out of beta). I do realize that the amount of available space most likely won’t be a problem for most people.

Music Manager seems like it’s designed to constantly run in the background on your computer. This way whenever you add music to your iTunes or other libraries the program will automatically find it and add it to your cloud. It’s more “hands off” when compared to Amazon’s MP3 Uploader and still provides more options for controlling bandwidth and the like but you lose the “instant” factor that Amazon provides when purchasing from their store. Basically once you install Music Manager, link it to your Google account and point it towards your music library all you have to do is wait for it to fill up.

So far you know what you’ll have to do to set up both services. Now let’s head into Part II, where I’ll walk you through the features of actually listening to your tunes using the desktop in-browser players for each service.

Part II: Jammin’ (Listening to your music in a web browser)

Now that you’re all set up and you’ve got some music in the cloud I’m assuming you’re going to want to listen to it at some point, right? OK, let’s take a look at using your web browser on your desktop or laptop for each service.

Using Amazon Cloud Player

When the Amazon Cloud Player loads up it defaults to sorting your music by artist, displaying the cover art for the most recently uploaded tracks. You can easily change the sorting to Album, Songs, Genre or Deleted Items if you choose. The “Songs” and individual playlist selections display a “list” view where the rest keep the cover art view in tact. For the cover art view you can play your music by clicking on the play button that appears in the bottom left corner for each cover. In the list view the play button appears on the left of the row when you mouse over a song.

All of the normal play options that you’d expect are here and operate well. You can manually create playlists from tunes in your library that will sync between the mobile app and browser. All the commands are nice and snappy with little lag in response. Sound quality is great as it quickly loads a cache’d version of the song, which I imagine is basically the same thing as downloading the actual file. There are buttons to play/pause, skip forward/back, volume, shuffle, repeat all and scrub the play position of the song. You can also sort the albums or playlist by track number, title, album, artist or track time.

For music you buy from the Amazon MP3 Store the option to automatically download to your machine is in the settings for the player. You can also download any of the tracks you’ve purchased or manually uploaded to any machine that you’re signed in to. The check boxes can also be used to add songs to a playlist or delete from the library. All in all it’s a intuitive if not fancy UI that serves its purpose very well.

Using Google Music

When loading up Google Music beta’s browser interface you’re greeted by a selection of newly uploaded or recently played music. You’ll notice immediately that Google Music is a bit more “designed” than Amazon’s utility approach or Google’s own aesthetic, for that matter. From here you can select one of the fifteen items it presents (including a big “Shuffle All” box) or navigate your way to songs, artists, albums or genres on the left.

Much like Amazon’s Cloud Player you’ll see album art views for everything but the songs list. In a nice feature in the artist and genre views, if more than one album applies you’ll see a “stack” of albums stretching out to the right of the top one letting you know there’s multiple selections available.

Beyond the basic controls Google Music also offers a few unique features in their browser-based player. The ability to give a particular song a “thumbs up” or “thumbs down”, which can be used later on to create a special playlist of songs that you’ve given a Ebert-approved review. There’s also “Instant Mixes” which you can think of as Google Music’s version of iTunes’ Genius feature. Select a song, choose “make instant mix” from the sub menu and Music will generate a playlist populated with related music from your library. These playlists are saved in the browser-based player and synced with the mobile app. Lastly there’s a section where you can browse free songs to add to your collection, a nice way of discovering new music though they’re not necessarily based on what’s in your library already.

The problem with Google’s player is the lag in response time when navigating through everything. Right now I’m chalking it up to the fact that there’s 20,000 songs uploaded to my library and it’s probably complicated to sort through everything in an instant. I’d love to hear from someone who has a much smaller library as to how it responds for them. The workaround I use for this is to utilize the excellent search available at the top of each page to jump directly to an artist or album. I know, it’s kind of shocking that a Google product has a great search engine.

Both services are pretty self-explanatory when it comes to playing the music, as they should be. Let’s head into Part III, where I take a look at the Android apps tied to each service.

Part III: Born To Run (Using the Android apps)

Arguably the main attraction to using any cloud service is the promise and ability to access your items any device at any time. In theory using a cloud music service will virtually eliminate the need to buy a high capacity dedicated music player since we could just stream our entire libraries to our phones.

This post is taking a look at the dedicated Android apps. I do not own any iOS devices but both the Amazon and Google browser-based players can be used in the mobile version of Safari.

Using the Amazon MP3 App

Amazon’s MP3 Store app has been around Android’s Marketplace for a good long time. When they launched the Cloud Drive/Player the app was updated to stream the music files in your drive. As far as I know this was the first time a dedicated app could stream music from a personal cloud drive to a mobile device, but I could be wrong.

When the app loads up you’ll either be looking at your cloud drive music or the mp3 store. There’s a link in the top right corner of the app to switch between the two. We’re going to concentrate on the “player” portion of the app only. In the player you can view all of your Cloud Drive music or only what’s available on your device. There’s buttons to sort everything by playlists, artists, albums or songs. No matter how you’re sorted or where you navigate the play/pause and skip track controls stay at the bottom, displaying the name and artist of the current track. When you find what you’d like to listen to simply select it to get going.

The app has a nice, snappy response to it that is very appealing. The layout is clean and intuitive letting you get around quickly and easily. If you’re not on a wifi connection you need not worry, the songs cache fairly quickly over 3G (I don’t have a 4G phone, still rocking the original Moto Droid). It just feels like a well-designed and programmed app which is something us owners of earlier model Android phones can certainly appreciate. I have not felt the app slow up almost at all as I’ve added music to my Cloud Drive.

Scan this QR code to grab the Amazon MP3 app:

Using Google’s Music app:

The plainly-titled Music app is as old as the Android OS itself. Having served as the base media player on devices the app received a complete overhaul with the announcement of the Google Music beta. The entire UI was cleaned-up and support for connection to your cloud-based music was added among other things.

Loading up the Music app displays a clean, uncluttered list of artists to choose from. Unlike the Amazon app this one seemlessly blends your on-device and cloud-based music. Navigation is simple with large buttons and rows making it hard to select the wrong item accidentally. To play an item you can long-press the artist, album or song and select play or you have to navigate down to the song level and select one. Long-pressing (or pressing the circle on the right side of the line) an item also brings up a sub menu with various options as seen in this image:

It’s worth noting that the sub menu for a song (as displayed in this image on the right) is different than the one you’ll get for albums and artists. In the menu not pictured you get the option to make those selections available offline. Choosing to make music available offline will download those files to your device for listening when you don’t have a data connection.

The app isn’t always fancy to look at but it is a clean way to get done what you want to do: listen to music. Much like the browser-based player this app has some serious lag trying to handle the full load library of 20,000 songs that I’m throwing at it. Once you get through to a sort option with less items it works just fine. I also imagine that the performance would be all that much better on a newer phone than what I’m using, hopefully I’ll find out soon.

Scan this QR code to grab the Music app:

Well, that’s the basics and features of each service. Let’s head into Part IV, where I wrap up my thoughts on both services and give you an idea about what to expect from Apple’s upcoming iCloud service.

Part IV: The End (Final thoughts, suggestions and looking ahead)

Both services are pretty similar in terms of what they offer, how they work and performance. Amazon’s Cloud Player is the only service that is completely available to everyone as Google Music is still in invite-only beta with no word on when it will be open to everyone. Pretty soon both will have some major competition in the form of Apple’s iCloud service.

The iCloud program will offer a number of features but right now all we’ll concern ourselves with are the music-related features. Apple is offering 5GB of storage for iCloud and in a similar fashion to Amazon any music you purchase from iTunes will not count against your limit. Everything you purchase will be automatically kept in sync with all of your iOS devices. The big feature that has everyone talking up iCloud is something called iTunes Match. Sometime this fall iTunes will scan your entire library and try to match it to the 18 million songs available in the iTunes Store so that you don’t have to upload your entire library manually. This includes CDs you may have ripped or music you purchase elsewhere. Apple will upgrade the matched files to 256 kbps AAC. If Match does not find your file it will upload it to the cloud as it is. Apple will be charging you $24.99 a year for this service while the basic iCloud service, iTunes Match-less, will be free.

When it comes down to it, which service is the best for you? I think that answer lies in how you find yourself listening to music and what devices you own. If you are deeply rooted in iOS devices and buy a majority of your music from iTunes, you’ll definitely want to wait for the iCloud and iTunes Match services to be widely available. If you find yourself buying most of your music from Amazon’s mp3 store you’ll probably want to stick with their Cloud Player.

It’s no secret that I’m a big Google fan so it’s weird to find myself saying that I have a hard time giving their Music beta (as it stands now) a full recommendation. Google does not have a service to buy music and seamlessly integrate it into their player which means you have to get your tunes from another source and have their Music Manager software find and upload it. Despite an excellent search function in the Google players neither are as snappy and responsive as Amazon’s Cloud Player.

For a long while I’ve preferred Amazon’s MP3 store to iTunes. Though Apple dropped DRM from their store more than two years ago Amazon never had it in the first place. They also sell good old-fashioned mp3s that are compatible with everything instead of AAC files. Though there are a lot of devices and programs that can handle those with no problem they’re still not as universal as MP3s. Combine that with the recent announcement of unlimited music storage space in Amazon’s Cloud Drive and I’m most comfortable suggesting their service as the one to use. Google has plenty of time to improve Music, and I’m sure they will, but it’s beta status, lack of store and needed performance improvements in their players are enough for me to suggest holding off for a while.

So there you have it! I hope that I’ve provided enough information and analysis to help you in your decision to jump into the music cloud world. It’s fun times that we live in now and the fact that we have so many options available to us is reason alone to celebrate. Please feel free to leave a comment or write in with your own experiences, I’d love to hear your take on all this.