A few weeks ago, I signed up for a invitation to Google Music. The service is only available in the US but, by a lucky chance of fate, I just happened to be connected to my corporate VPN so I was successful and an invitation duly arrived in my Inbox.
Initially, the Google Music Manager software didn’t support Linux. Nor was the Ogg Vorbis audio format supported so I didn’t pursue it any further as both of these were show stoppers for me. I don’t intend re-ripping my entire music collection to MP3 format.
However, last week, Google released a Linux version of Music Manager and added ‘support’ for Ogg format audio files. The ‘support’ for the Ogg format is slightly strange - Ogg audio files will be transcoded back to 320kps MP3 files which represents a conversion from one lossy format to another lossy format. Hopefully, in the longer term, there will be true native support for Ogg.
Anyway, I downloaded the Music Manager software and started uploading my music collection mainly so I could listen to music on my netbook which currently runs Chromium OS.
I started the upload 2 days ago and it’s been running during the day. So far, it has managed to upload 505 songs out of a total 1,880 so it’s not exactly a speedy process.