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Google Music Linux Technology

Google Music Adds Linux, Ogg Vorbis Support 111

Posted by timothy from the such-funny-names dept.
luceth writes "According to Android Police, the Google Music library manager now supports Linux! Also available in the Linux upload manager is new support for Ogg Vorbis, though they transcode it to 320 Kbps MP3 like they do with FLAC. Still, it will be nice to get some use out of that beta invite."
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Google Music Adds Linux, Ogg Vorbis Support More

Google Music Adds Linux, Ogg Vorbis Support

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  • I just finished uploading my library from Windows yesterday.

    • Re: (Score:1)

      by Anonymous Coward

      Did you also choose a temperature-dependent bitrate of 320 kelvinbits per seconds?

  • Isn't that a bit ogg?

  • I have to wait till its available in Australia :'(

    • Re: (Score:1)

      by AvitarX ( 172628 )

      Try ubuntu one.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by mcgrew ( 92797 ) *

      I think I'll wait until hell freezes over. I'll keep my data stored on my own devices; storage is dirt cheap and the storage devices are very small these days. I just don't see any advantage to uploading my music to anybody, especially Google since they yanked my mcgrew@gmail.com address a few years ago with no explanation or recourse; I'd used it to correspond with friends and family, sign up for subscriptions to /. and such but that was all. I'd hate to have half of my music on Google and have it just di

  • One of the easiest things to do is fling music across the net. You can do it with Apache and DynDNS and roll your own or you can do something else.

    Rolling my own with Apache is not difficult (I've done it) but is not likely what Joe User is going to do. Opera Unite is drool proof - it even makes a domain service like DynDNS superfluous. Plus it's been running on Linux since forever ago, it seems.

    And my music stays put on my own machine at home.

    --
    BMO

    • A lot of NAS appliances offer this too. Some also have dedicated iPhone and Android apps -- though the quality probably varies a lot. Still, I personally find the Google Music app to be subpar on Android. It's gotten a lot better, but worse too in many ways. Some things require too many clicks/taps - and I dont really need a dynamic colored background or the little dropdown context menu. It seems somewhere alone the lines the UI designers forgot they were designing for touchscreens. /endramble

    • yo do not even need to roll your own. Just use Ampache [ampache.org], and host it yourself. There are Android and boxee clients. I no longer use satellite radio since I stream everything to my phone for long drives..

    • Is the streaming accessible via iPhone or Android phones?

    • iPhone didn't do anything that you couldn't already do with Symbian or WinMo, either (in fact, it still does less in many areas). Didn't stop it from becoming the single best selling smartphone in a very short time.

  • Borders (Score:4, Informative)

    by Nerdfest ( 867930 ) on Saturday July 23, 2011 @01:42AM (#36854858)
    I'd love to try it out, but once again it's only US and we Canadians can't play yet. We're still waiting for Google voice too, although I doubt that's their fault, and more likely related to our telecom providers. Damn nice to see a little Linux love, between this, Adobe's 64 bit flash player, and the supposed support for OnLive coming in the future.

    • I'd love to try it out

      Why? mp3's are small. Just get yourself a portable player with an 80GB (or larger) hard drive and you'll be set for months of uninterrupted music.

      Maybe I'm missing something, but I don't see any practical value to this service. Maybe if it let you stuff blurays into it, that would be something. But just dinky little music files? Especially when it transcodes it to mp3 so you can't ever get the original back out? What good is that?

      • Practical value: Access to your entire music collection on your Android phone, your Android tablet, and anywhere you can open a web browser, all without having to remember to upload the files to each device individually (or taking up the precious limited space on your phone or tablet.) I have an iPod with plenty of space for most of my collection, but if the battery dies or I forget it, I have a backup plan if I want to listen to music (it's happened to me recently, and it was nice to have that backup.) An
        • Comment removed based on user account deletion

          • Nothing is subpar compared to 64kbps MP3s.

            Personally, I don't carry an MP3 player for the same reason I also don't carry a camera, watch, address book, PDA and handheld GPS: convenience.

            On the other hand, I don't stream; I just got a big microSD card and I sync using Wifi. But for people with large music libraries, streaming is probably cheaper.

            • Re: (Score:1)

              by Anonymous Coward
              Personally, I DO carry an MP3 player for the same reason I also carry a camera and watch: convenience.

              It's much better to run down the battery in my MP3 player than my phone. It's much better if I damage or lose my MP3 player than my phone. It's much better to listen to music on my MP3 player because no phone has sound quality like it.

              The same things apply for my camera, only for images instead of music.

              Looking at a watch is vastly more convenient than having to break out the phone whenever I need

              • Re: (Score:1)

                by Calos ( 2281322 )

                I used to be in the "I want my phone to just be a phone" camp.

                Now I have an Android smartphone. I generally get ~24 hours out of it between charges, though I plug it in every night. Playing music with it consumes almost no battery - optimized hardware decode paths and all that. I can play music for a couple hours and still be at 80-90% battery - which is enough to last me until the next morning, if need be.

                I wouldn't call it a "sub par" player, either, I don't know why that is assumed. It has all the us

                • Re: (Score:2)

                  by cynyr ( 703126 )

                  I'm getting right around 13 hours on my phone with 9-10 of that being google music streaming. I can do the same battery tiimes with slacker as well. Also since I sit at my desk mostly all day, i could always plug my phone into the computer to charge it if i wanted.

                  I've dropped point and shoot cameras for everything outside of camping for my cell, my watch is also my cell, my mp3 player too.

          • Have you never heard of a power plug? You can plug things in, AND listen to them at the same time these days. What will they think of next?

          • 64kbps??? that is telephone quality maybe.

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by adolf ( 21054 )

          Being able to access your collection from multiple devices from anywhere with an internet connection is the major draw of Subsonic [subsonic.org]. I'm still trying it out and deciding if it's awesome or just kinda cool, but so far I'm liking not having to upload everything to the cloud first.

          There. Fixed that for you.

  • It looks like it's not actually a real port of the music manager, rather a Wine port with their wrapper stuff, like Picasa.

    • As long as it's tested and supported (well, Google levels of support, which aren't exactly great), who cares?

      Although I do use the Windows version of Picasa with Wine instead of the version wrapped by Google, but that's because they're lagging the versions behind (the Linux 'port' still doesn't support facial recognition).

    • It's a small package, with no dependencies on Wine, only on packages that I already had installed on Ubuntu 11.04 64-bit. It works quite smoothly. The only hitch is that it tries to use the notification area, which doesn't exist in Ubuntu 11.04's Unity interface.

      Google offers a number of applications for Linux, and has repositories for current versions of Ubuntu. Google claims to use OS X and their own rebranded version of Google internally more than they use Windows, so it's only surprising that there was

  • So far I have 1,916 of 2,828 songs uploaded to Google music.

    I'm interested to see how often my phone will need to buffer while in normal use.
    • I've only really tried it a couple times, but: In my house where I don't get that great a 3G signal, I had a hard time getting a whole song to actually play (buffering...buffering.) Granted that was not too long after it launched. Tried it again just now, and seemed to work great, downloaded a whole 3:20 song in about 30 seconds and had no pauses. Only two points of data, but take it for what it's worth. :)

      Turning on WiFi on the phone, it works perfectly, with only about 5-10 seconds pause at the start
    • Comment removed based on user account deletion

      • They already know of this. Google asked them for a license on reasonable terms, but eventually gave up (on "reasonable"). Sometimes I wonder if that Google engineer who flipped the "go online" key did it with his middle finger.

  • That's the only thing that might make me consider this.
    Actually, I'm joking: even if it did, I wouldn't be interested!

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by radish ( 98371 )

      I hear you. Was kind of interested in Spotify until I tried it, super long gaps. Not impressed!

  • What's so special about google music compared to something like grooveshark?

    I could already upload all my music to grooveshark and listen to it from any computer and there is also a mobile app for devices that don't support flash like the iPhone and iPad.

    What makes grooveshark better than google music IMO is that with grooveshark you don't even need to upload much of your music because it's already all there since you essentially have access to everyone's uploaded tracks. But you can still upload your own i

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by Homburg ( 213427 )

      Grooveshark's business model appears to be based on blatantly infringing copyright, then hoping they can negotiate deals with the record labels. Google Music is based on doing something that probably isn't copyright infringement (although the RIAA may disagree), backed up by Google's lawyers. I like Grooveshark, but I don't know that it's going to be around for very long.

  • If I recall correctly, OGG and MP3 use very different (lossy) compression techniques. As a result, converting from one to the other will drop audio quality substantially.

    What's the point of providing a feature that will, in all likelihood, make your music sound bad?

    • Re: (Score:1)

      by osu-neko ( 2604 )

      If I recall correctly, OGG and MP3 use very different (lossy) compression techniques.

      That is true.

      As a result, converting from one to the other will drop audio quality substantially.

      That is false. Converting to any lossy format causes a change from the original source, of course, but there's no reason why it becomes magically worse in these circumstances. You'll see about the same amount of change on average regardless of whether the starting waveform was direct from a ADC, from an MP3 decoder, from an OGG decoder, or whatever. Whether that constitutes a "drop in audio quality" is debatable -- sometimes its actually an improvement, but then "audio quality" is a bit subj

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by Bozzio ( 183974 )

        Both OGG and MP3 lossy compression techniques work by sacrificing aspects of the original waveform that often go unnoticed by the human ear. Some approaches even take advantage of what's considered the auditory equivalent of optical illusions, removing large chucks of audio information which, due to how the human ear and brain processes audio, go by almost completely unnoticed. It's actually pretty cool :)

        My point is, from what I read a couple of years ago, many of the more ambitions compression technique

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by Bozzio ( 183974 )

      lol, I just noticied that my thread title has been sanitized to OGG = MP3!

      It's supposed to be OGG <=> MP3.

    • If I recall correctly, OGG and MP3 use very different (lossy) compression techniques. As a result, converting from one to the other will drop audio quality substantially.

      What's the point of providing a feature that will, in all likelihood, make your music sound bad?

      You will not be able to tell the difference on your cell phone earbuds, which seems to be the target use of Google Music.

      You probably would not be able to tell the difference on a $5,000 home audio system either, but whatever.

    • And even sillier, it's not necessary - Android plays Vorbis just fine...

    • While it is a little silly (for multiple reasons) to transcode ogg, in my experience, oggs look more like lossless codecs that just have a more finely tuned filter on low volume sounds. MP3 throws out the high frequency spectrum to lose data, where ogg just throws out low amplitude data. Image compression analogy: mp3 is like changing the image resolution, ogg is like the full scale original just with some of the dark sections set to #000000 instead of something like #010101.

  • Do no evil? (Score:3)

    by Hatta ( 162192 ) on Saturday July 23, 2011 @11:32AM (#36856940) Journal

    Transcoding lossy formats is always evil. No support is better than propagating generational errors on digital formats.

    • Well, they might have found out how to do the conversion in an information-preserving way.
      There are some smart people at google, you know...

  • google needs to convert the Ogg Vorbis files over to MP3, which is neither free nor better. What is the reasoning behind this? Would implementing basic support for Ogg Vorbis be beyond the magical powers of google, or did they have to strike up some evil pact of exclusivity and goat sacrifice with the people who own the MP3 patent in order that their product would have a familiar/attractive format de/compression capability?

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