back to article Hackers find Google's music cloud

Android hackers have discovered that Google's cloud-based music service is up and running, for those prepared to muck about with the internals of Honeycomb at least. Google has been widely expected to launch a cloud-based music service – an online store of your existing collection – and that‘s exactly what's been found in the …

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  1. Rich 30

    data...

    This seems great. Except only over wifi.

  2. Stuart Castle Silver badge

    Ok..

    Three slight problems...

    1) Wifi is not available everywhere. This can be alleviated by using 3G, but:

    2) Most people (in this country anyway) are on a limited tariff. Stream a few MP3s regularly, and your 500 meg will soon go.

    3) Are people *really* going to upload their dodgy MP3s to servers hosted by a company that probably has their home address whether they have entered it into their google account or note (thanks to the Streetview data grab) and despite what the article says has shown itself to be remarkably compliant when dealing with copyright holders?

  3. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Large collections

    How does this work for those of us with large music collections (>20GB and growing)? Will I need to spend a whole month uploading it to the cloud (stuck with 400Kbit/s upload) and blowing my ISP's data cap in the process?

    Hope when it arrives it's an optional feature and comes turned off as default.

    1. James Hughes 1

      Have you worked out

      How long it would take you to listen to all your music in one sitting?

      How many of your tracks have NEVER been listened too?

      Maybe some 'archiving' might be in order?

      1. Radelix

        music signatures

        Having discussed this with people familiar to the matter you wont be uploading tracks per se but a signature that determines what the track is. Not going to be perfect but it wont be 20 GB's worth of data

      2. Anonymous Coward
        Thumb Down

        Archive?...20GB?

        I assume you all meant to say 200GB (not 20GB) right? (which is still not huge). My Mozart collection alone is 48GB! (FLAC) - which would only take 7.5 days to listen to (not long when you work from home) - I did 11 hours of Mozart today (maybe Rachmaninoff tomorrow - who knows).

        I wish I had such foresight (as you obviously do) to know what I wanted to listen to each day for the upcoming week/month/year - but I don't. Assuming you knew what you wanted to listen to for the week it would still be around 20GB of FLAC. The whole point of a music library is that you don't know what you may want to listen to, so have more than you need available - and 20GB ain't excessive - not by a long shot - add a 0 and you're getting closer.

      3. Nick Wallis
        WTF?

        100 hours

        and that's what the 'Unplayed this month' playlist is for.

        Bit harder to manage with the 9 foot shelf full of vinyl to my left though.

    2. MikeSM

      Re: Large collections

      This is a great point. I don't see why Google couldn't license an acoustic fingerprinting service like Shazam, and develop a client-side app that scans your music collection and then securely transmits a list of all your songs to their server.

  4. morphoyle

    Record companies

    I swear, copyright holders won't be happy until we pay them every single time we listen to a song or watch a movie. Such greedy bastards.

    1. BorkedAgain
      Badgers

      Oh for heaven's sakes...

      ...now you've given them an idea. You just *know* they're working out how to do that *right now*

      Nice one, genius...

      Where's the hand-over-fist icon? Ah well, badgers it is...

    2. Sorry that handle is already taken. Silver badge

      Listen

      You mean they don't want any money until we've listened to the music?

      Are you sure?

  5. Tom 38
    Black Helicopters

    Fair Use? No such thing

    So this is covered by 'Fair Use'. Awesome. Except there is no such thing as 'Fair Use' in the UK, even ripping your own CD is technically copyright infringement in the UK.

    Copyright desperately needs to be reformed to suit the needs of society. There should be legislation to prevent the exploitation of consumers by copyright holders because of a 1950s understanding of technology. Why should ripping a CD to MP3 be 'Fair Use', whilst ripping a BD/DVD is illegal? Charging for 'Format shifting' is obscene.

  6. Ian Michael Gumby
    Pirate

    It kind of makes sense...

    How many copies of a song does Google actually have to hold? Only one.

    Assuming that you have a paid for copy of a song, when you send it to the cloud, if you do a hash on it, it will match a copy uploaded by another person who paid for the song in the same format. If the hash doesn't match... then the other copy is stored and you end up with two 'similar' songs with two different access lists.

    Google then stores only one copy of the song and retains two references to it. One to you, one to the other guy. As more people upload the song, the same copy is kept, and the additional references are added to the song's 'user' list.

    When you delete a song from the cloud, all you are doing is deleting your reference to the song.

    Google will probably keep the song in their cloud even after the last digital rights holder has deleted their reference.

    Now Google will probably keep tabs on the songs.

    They will know the most popular song based on the number of uploads.

    If they want to sell you a song, they can sell you the rights to the song that someone uploaded, and then they can pay the royalties for the song. Can Google scam the record companies?

    You bet.

    So yeah, this makes sense for Google. It makes sense for the customer who purchased their music too. For the Freetard? Not so much. Although it would be difficult for the MPAA to show that the copy you uploaded was an 'illegal' copy. And of course a good hack would be to grant yourself access to all of the songs in the Google cloud. ;-)

    But hey! What do I know?

    1. Vladimir Plouzhnikov

      Good hack

      "And of course a good hack would be to grant yourself access to all of the songs in the Google cloud. ;-)"

      And get a complete collection of Justin Bieber! Yay!

  7. batfastad
    Stop

    pants

    Sounds a bit rubbish. I hope it can all be turned off.

    I'd prefer they worked on FLAC support in the built-in Music program. Not because I or can appreciate the extra quality when listening on the go, but so I don't have to convert to MP3 every time I want to change the music on my phone.

    Whilst the read speed of data from local storage is: significantly faster, less battery draining and more reliable than the read speed over wireless networks, local media storage (ie on a phone/laptop/whatever) will always win with me.

  8. L1feless
    Pint

    Sweet

    This is a fantastic service. Now all Google needs to add to this is an iTunes like store and allow a mix of the two, Google purchased music & user uploaded content. Music purchased available anywhere and music you already own available from anywhere B-E-A-Utiful.

    The great thing is this can easily be expanded into a personal media hub. I would like to see phase 2 extend to film & TV. A great concept would be to have HD content up loadable and then stream back in an appropriate resolution based on your own personal media devices.

    A beer because the snow storm here made me miss picking mine up on the weekend.

    1. Calum Morrison
      Badgers

      Sounds like you need...

      ...mp3tunes.com. I've had around 120Gb uploaded with them (and growing) for years. Music is backed up (and easily redownloadable) and can be streamed to any client their open APIs support. It was set up by Michael Robertson who has already sold some tech to Google; could this be his next divestment?

  9. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    ODFO

    And another facet of our lives gets profiled and added the the great archive of stuff google knows about us. Soon the big G will know more about us than we know about ourselves.

  10. NoneSuch Silver badge
    Grenade

    O M G

    Just store copies of songs on the darned phones / tablets. Having my precious bandwidth constantly interfered with by others playing Björk and Yoko over a cloud connection just sets my teeth on edge.

    Download once, play many times. What a concept.

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