I was pretty excited when Amazon beat the crowd that matters to the cloud with the Amazon Cloud Player. Since I buy all of my music from Amazon, it is convenient to have my music purchases sent directly to my Amazon cloud, for immediate playing, and downloading only as needed.
I was so excited, in fact, that I bought a bunch more cloud space and began the arduous process of moving my huge music collection to the cloud.
But there was a little problem. Like many audiophiles, I am pretty anal where my music tags and artwork are concerned. If I see a mislabeled genre or mixed up album cover, I need- who am I kidding, I simply must have- a way to quickly fix it.
On the Amazon cloud, that’s not all that easy to do. Amazon doesn’t (yet) provide a way to edit song or album details from the cloud. You have to download the songs you want to fix, delete them from the cloud, fix them locally and then re-upload them.
That’s sort of a drag. Figuratively and literally. I also find Amazon’s music uploader less than elegant and not very reliable.
With Google’s recent introduction of Google Music, there is a new competitor in the cloud. While it’s early, I think I slightly prefer Google’s look and feel.
But probably not enough to outweigh the ability to send my Amazon purchases directly to my Amazon cloud. However, I quickly discovered a feature that tips the scale decidedly in favor of Google. It’s much more appealing than Lady Gaga. It’s the ability to edit from the cloud!
Sweet!
At the end of the day, the process to get my new music from Amazon to Google Music is pretty simple, and automated. I configured Google Music Manager to monitor my Amazon download folder, and automatically upload whatever shows up there.
I agree that Apple may one day deliver a cloud-dominating knock-out punch, but that may take some time, as you can never count out the innovation adverse music industry (as an aside, I get a few dollars from BMI every quarter or so, and I still can’t abide the obstacles these organizations keep tossing on the path to access). They may be trying to protect someone’s income, but I’m not certain it’s the songwriters’.
In any event, I’m pretty excited about Google Music. The 20,000 song limit will prevent me from moving all of my music there (at least until cheap extra storage becomes available, like Amazon offers).
But as of now, it’s leading the race to become my default music manager. Stay tuned, however, because the race is just beginning.
Newsome.Org 
lol!
lol!
The related problem I found so far is that if you edit a music tag locally in your hard drive, the resident application that monitors your music folders does not updates the online version of the track. That’s a very important feature IMO and I hope it’s not there only because Music is still in beta.
Nah, that will probably require a rescan of your music folder – unless you do it in some app with some google music sync support that will probably be standardized in an API.
I agree with Carlos, this is a major flaw, and it’s still there a year later. It should be able to rescan and realize the tags have changed, and that it doesn’t have to actually upload the entire music file again. (I have CrashPlan backup service, and it notices these things easily.) I hear Apple’s cloud can apparently do this. And many users are complaining that their properly tagged MP3s *aren’t* showing up properly tagged in Google Music in the first place. The tags on my MP3s show up properly in iTunes, MP3Tag, and other programs, but not always in Google Music. I’m surprised at how terrible it really is, currently I’m looking for another music cloud for my Galaxy SII.
Quite a necro-bump (or comment) there Jim. 😛 If you are willing to pay, and don’t live in the United States of impossible-to-negotiate-rights-for-squat you could give Deezer a try. It’s 9.99€ or something a month, and it is not a cloud it is a streaming service. But it is a cloud too, and you can upload unlimited amounts of mp3s and access from anywhere where you have a browser, or on your S II.