Google’s music locker in the cloud, called Play Music, has just outsmarted every rival service out there by more than doubling its storage limit, letting you store 50,000 songs in the cloud as opposed to the previous 20,000-song limit.
You don’t even have to be subscribed to the $9.99 per month Google Play Music All Access subscription service, meaning everyone can take advantage of this offer immediately, without upgrading their Drive storage.
The change, effective immediately, gives Google Play Music more competitive footing against Apple’s scan-and-match $25 per year iTunes Match service that supports storing up to 25,000 user-uploaded songs in iCloud (more if songs are purchased from the iTunes Store).
“Google Play Music now lets you upload up to 50,000 tracks so you can mix your entire collection with our 30 million songs,” said the search giant.
But again, iTunes Match is a paid service ($25 annually also buys you ad-free iTunes Radio) while Google Play Music lets anyone upload twice as many songs to the cloud versus iTunes Match, at no cost.
As for Amazon Music, that service lets you store 250 songs in the cloud free of charge. In exchange for a subscription fee of $25 per year, Amazon Music users can upload as many as 250,000 tracks to the service.
Last updated in mid-February, the official Google Play Music iOS app for the iPhone and iPad gained revamped artist and album pages with descriptions and an all-new immersive Now Playing experience.
Featuring Google’s Material Design look and feel, support for the new iPhone 6 and iPhone 6 Plus resolutions and containing a whole bunch of useful features, the service is actually worth checking out and highly recommended, especially given that the service is also available for Android, on the web and through a Chrome extension.
To upload songs to Google Play, use the Google Play Music Manager app for Windows, Mac and Linux PCs. On your computer, go to play.google.com/music and click Upload Music (Add Music if you’re a Chrome user) near the top right. Now click Download Music Manager and follow the installation directions.
Download Google Play Music free in the App Store.
And in which music-locker in the cloud do you host your out-of-print CDs and other music collections? I’m a loyal Spotify fan and a former iTunes Match subscriber who keeps his existing music library in the Google cloud now.
Source: Google