Google Music Beta

Ok, so I'm sure there will be little original here, but I got it, I have time to kill, I'll talk about it. Also, no screenshots. I don't feel like it. Plus, I'm setting up over a remote desktop session, and screenshots are way more trouble than they're worth.

As others have said, over and over again, the install was very straight forward. The only issue I ran in to was that during install I was not able to select other folder locations for music source. When I selected that radio button, there was no visible browse button. I had to choose my iTunes library, complete the install, and then go back and update my settings to search for a different source location.

When going back and changing my music source location, the initial update only located about 500 or so tracks out of over 11,000. Removing, and re-adding my folder locations seemed to fix this, and now google music appears to be aware of my entire library.

It looks like music is uploading at the rate of around 100 tracks per minute. This is gonna take a while.

One interesting item to note, although I haven't actually tried to listen to music, the google music site is not restricted by our very "selective" network rules. I've seen other google services get by network restrictions in the past, and it looks like this is yet another google service that works in spite of the efforts of the local network admin.

As I'm uploading, I'm noticing that I don't have any of my iTunes playlists. I am supposed to be able to sync those playlists, but it looks like that's only available if I choose to only sync my iTunes library. Google, talk to the guys at AudioGalaxy. They have a working solution for this.

My first pass at making an "Instant Mix" was really, really bad. Google, go over and talk to the guys at Audio Galaxy. They have an extremely good solution for this. I'll wait a couple of days for things to upload a little more and try it again. If it's still this bad, I'll be logging an issue report. It's that bad.

Overall, my first impression is that the Google Music Beta solution doesn't match my streaming player of choice, AudioGalaxy. Google beats AudioGalaxy in that Google will allow me to download my music to my phone. AudioGalaxy doesn't offer this. Don't know if it's on their road map, I hope it is.
Sure, Google gives me offline access to my music through the locker, but normally I simply don't care about this. I can easily stream from my own computers to my phone, and I like it that way. The one exception so far is that I'm relocating soon, and my servers will be offline for a few days. Beyond that, though, I have yet to find a reason to really want my music stored elsewhere other than for the sake of redundancy.
Google's locker is ok for now because it's big enough for me to double my music collection for free (for now, anyway), so I can look past the idea of storing my stuff on someone else's servers for now.

I'm sure I'll ramble on about more stuff, but that's it for now. I'm done killing time.