Episode: 1391
Title: HPR1391: Google Play Music All Access
Source: https://hub.hackerpublicradio.org/ccdn.php?filename=/eps/hpr1391/hpr1391.mp3
Transcribed: 2025-10-18 00:42:59

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Hello, this is Ahuka. Welcome to Hacker Public Radio, another exciting episode. This is
going to be a little bit different because it's not part of any series that I've done,
but I want to talk about something that I'm a fan of. And so, to start with, I'm going
to say, I like music. I'm guessing I'm not the only one, and I don't tend to put a lot of
music into my podcasts because that can cause problems. But I certainly enjoy listening to music,
and I love having it with me. I have a large music collection to draw on, and you know, having it
with me at all times can be a bit of a problem considering how much music I have. Right now, I have
a couple of portable players, two of which are full of music that I carry with me. My pockets can
get kind of full that way. And while I like listening to the tracks I own, what about finding new
stuff? My players have never suggested anything. And that's where the cloud services come in.
My first cloud service was Pandora. I could listen to it on a computer using Pithos, I think,
is the name of the app that I use on my Kabuntu machine, or on my phone with the Android app for
Pandora. Pandora is like a radio station that plays the kind of music you'd like. You give the
service the name of an artist, and it builds a channel for you based on that style of music.
It finds other artists to consider similar to the one you named, and builds a playlist around that.
I find that roughly every five to eight tracks it plays something from the artist you named
with the rest being the similar artists, what it considers similar. It's not bad.
You can use it for free if you don't mind ads and only use it 40 hours a month.
I like to go ad-free and unlimited and pay $36 for a year. I believe it's also available for
$3.99 per month. That's US dollars. I'm not sure what the euro price would be, but it's
probably in the same ballpark. Now I have probably mentioned this before. I tend to pay for apps when
I can to support the services I rely on. I think it's a problem actually that there are a lot of
people that are constantly looking for what they can get for free. You're not going to get quality
services or software for free. Just one of those things you have to take a look at. It may not be
money that has to be paid. Maybe it's other things, but support the people that are supporting you.
Pandora was good in its way. You can't really control it precisely though.
Sometimes I know exactly what I want to listen to or I want to check out an artist I just heard
about. So I got an account with Spotify. Spotify is a service that has most of the recorded music
available for you to stream and let you create playlists. A paid account is $10 a month.
It is fantastic for things like putting together a playlist of every song a particular artist
has recorded or making playlists to suit a particular need or mood. It has a very large library,
but not everything is there. A number of very high profile artists have refused to license their
music among them the Beatles. I happen to be a big Beatles fan and I have their albums on CD and
have ripped them to Aug or MP3 is needed, but that doesn't help on Spotify. Then two years ago Google
got into the competition. Their initial offering was based around a music store, much like the iTunes
store or Ubuntu One, but had an interesting feature that let you upload your own tracks to their
servers, from which you could stream those tracks to your devices. So I could upload all my Beatles
CDs to their servers and listen to them all I want. That was great. And I could also upload those
rarities that would otherwise be unavailable. Bootleg tracks, for instance, or direct sales tracks
from bands like Fish that sell concert recordings direct to the fans. This is a great feature,
and I signed up for my Google Music account. In addition, I could buy tracks from Google Music,
which would automatically be added to my account, and I could easily upload tracks I purchased from
places like Amazon or E-Music, both of which I patronized. So now I had three different cloud
services each doing different things. I liked them all well enough, and between them they pretty
much covered everything I wanted, but then Google raised the bar. It created a new service called
Google Play Music All Access, which combined all of the services into a single service for $10 a
month. The new Google Play Music All Access was somewhat recently released, and for your monthly
fee you get access to a large library of music you can stream in addition to all of your own tracks.
You can do this by creating playlists in which the tracks can come from Google's library or from
your own, and you can create radio stations similar to Pandora. I tried it, and after a week I
canceled my Pandora and Spotify accounts because now I get it all for less money. And for whatever
reason I find I'm listening to music even more often now with Google Play Music All Access. So how does
it work? Well, Google Play is the name for Google's all-in-one online store. It offers music,
movies, and TV, books, magazines, apps for Android, and even Google branded hardware like Nexus
and Chrome. So it combines in one place everything you might ever want to buy from Google.
For this review we'll focus just on the music section, but chances are that if you have an Android
phone you have visited the Google Play apps either on your phone or in your browser.
The Play Music app you will see has an icon like a pair of headphones.
All Access is what you get when you sign up for the $10 a month plan and gives you all of the
above services. And if you open the app on your phone you will see the following sections.
First one is Listen Now. This is where you can search for tracks in Google's library
plus all the tracks you have uploaded, plus suggestions based on your tracks, and even
suggestions based on playlists you have created. Then My Library. You can start with the tracks
you have uploaded, but you can also add any tracks you find in Google's library to your own My Library.
Now this doesn't mean that you're downloading them. It just means that they've been added to this
section of the app where they will be easily found. Remember this is really essentially a streaming
application. Next section is Playlists. So you can create playlists. I'm sure everyone is very
familiar with this. This is very similar to Spotify for instance. Then there is a section called
Radio. And you can create stations here by giving an artist or a track, something like that,
and telling Google to build a dynamic playlist of what it considers to be similar tracks.
So this is basically the Pandora equivalent. Then the last section is Explore. And you can
browse by new releases, particular genres, or check out curated playlists offered by Google.
This last section, I don't tend to go too very much because my taste does not match up with the
majority of the people using this app. So you can be pretty sure I really don't give a damn if
Lady Gaga has a new app or new track released. Now because we're talking about streaming, you should
definitely be thinking about whether this is using your mobile data. If you're worried about
data caps or you're worried about poor coverage in an area, what I always do is I load a couple
of gigabytes of tracks onto my phone from the music that I own. It could be their electronic tracks
that I've purchased from Google or Amazon or E-Music or something I've ripped from my CDs.
So I've always got a few gigs of those things on my phone. A good thing to do is go to your settings
menu and you can set that to stream over Wi-Fi only if you're considered getting hit with a big
data bill. You can also pin certain tracks to your device for offline listening. Open the track
you'd like to pin and look for an icon that looks like a push pin. If it's at an angle, that means
it can be downloaded to your device. If it is vertical, it means it has already been downloaded.
But note, you can only download a track twice. This really is meant to be a streaming service.
Note, again, you can in the settings specify that you will only download tracks via Wi-Fi.
Again, that'll help protect you against hitting a data cap.
Now, one of the things about this is that you can have all of these features on your
computer as well as on your phone. And actually, I do that even more. I use it mostly on my computer.
I've got, you know, decent speakers connected to my media computer and I use Google Chrome
and have that open to the Play Music app. And there I have all of the same access.
Now, maybe it's just because I'm a bit older than a lot of folks, I don't find managing everything
on my cell phone to be a lot of fun. It's a small screen. My fingers are big.
So, to me, having a full-size keyboard and a full-size monitor just makes my life easier.
So, I create my playlist and my browser on my computer. Now, of course, you have to be logged
into Google to do this, but if you're logged into Google, everything you do is synced through
your Google account and will show up on your phone. So, any playlist you create will be available
on your phone, any radio stations will be on your phone, etc. So, if you're logged into any
Google application, whether it's Gmail, Google Plus, or what have you, there's a little icon in
the upper right that looks like nine dots in a square. And if you click that, you can select
the play store. And from there, you can select music. Now, when you're in the play store,
if you go to my music, you get basically the same options you would've gotten on the Android app.
Listen now, which combines tracks you've uploaded, tracks you've put in playlists, etc. My library,
the radio for the stations you've created, explore if you want to see what's hot these days,
or playlists that other people have submitted to Google. There's auto playlists, which is playlists
that are generated by algorithms. And of course, the playlist you have created.
Now, one neat feature is that you can drag and drop any track into a playlist. A good example
is using the radio feature to find tracks you might not have known of previously.
And if you hear when you like, just drag it on a playlist, and it is added.
I generally listen to play music on my kabuntu desktop computer using Google Chrome,
but I have used it with Firefox, and at work, I've used Internet Explorer.
So, you know, I think with any reasonably modern browser, you shouldn't have any trouble.
Sharing. Google is all about social these days, so sharing music is built into the Google Play.
You can share playlists with your friends or with the general public. Now, what this means is
sharing through Google Plus. Google Plus is the center of everything with Google these days,
so you shouldn't be surprised. So, just open a playlist you want to share, and you will see a button
that says share playlist. If you click on that, you will get your options. The default for every
playlist is that it's private. But if you like, you can change that to public. When you do this,
a Google Plus button appears, and if you've been on Google Plus, you know what I'm talking about.
It's your standard, you know, post something on Google Plus kind of thing. And this lets you
select who you would like to share your playlist with. You can share it with the public,
which in practice means anyone who follows you on Google Plus, or you can select specific people.
They also need to be on Google Plus, though, for you to share with them.
And if anyone shares a playlist with you, you can subscribe to the playlist. And if they add tracks later,
those tracks will be added to your subscribed copy.
So, not a bad feature, really. Now, Google Play Music All Access depends on making license
deals with the record labels. So, it may not be everywhere in the world just yet.
But it has been rolled out initially in the United States. It was then rolled out in Australia,
New Zealand. Then in August, it was rolled out in nine European countries. Austria, Belgium,
France, Ireland, Italy, Luxembourg, Portugal, Spain, and the UK. It may have rolled out in
other UK countries since then, depending on what kind of deals Google was able to make and what
the licensing authorities are like. So, I'd expect that it'll start appearing most places as
they're able to make those deals. So, you might guess I'm a big fan. I really like this.
So, I'm sharing this with everyone in the hacker public radio audience.
Check it out. See if you like it. And, you know, I hope this has given you some interest in this.
So, as always, I'm going to sign off by reminding everyone to support free software. And this is
a hooker signing off. Bye.
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