I have an android phone.  I have lot’s of local music (~17,500 songs) on a music server.  I’d like that music to be more portable and to keep my collection more up to date.  I use Pandora often as an automatic DJ but Pandora often plays what it has available which doesn’t always overlap with what I want to hear.  I’ve tried Amazon MP3 and though it is convenient, there are too many limitations with a large music collection.

Enter Google Music.  They will handle 20,000 songs for free.  You can easily purchase songs and download to your devices and in my case my music server.  Content I buy elsewhere can also be placed on my music server and synced with my Google Music using their Music Manager software.  This sounds ideal for my situation.

So far I’ve uploaded my collection and made some attempts at using the service.  Uploading took several days on a 10mbps upstream connection.  The first issue is the playlist system, what is playing and how to control this is not particularly intuitive.  I hope this will improve.  More concerning is some new Music I purchased.  It shows up in my music server after a download.  It shows up on the Google Music website.  However, when I use the Google Play Music App, I am seeing some failures.  One song in particular is missing while all others are fine.  Google had me go through a series of corrective actions which I performed.  Their steps culminated in flushing the data and cache which did not resolve the issue.  Will other music go missing?

I’ve also noticed search results on my phone differ from those on the website.  I’ve clicked the “keep” button in the Google Play Music App to store some songs on my phone locally.  Apparently wiping your data also removes these songs unlike Amazon MP3 which does a hard download to a general music directory.

Overall, Google Music meets my needs by specification but the execution and some small issues leave me without full confidence and nagging use complications.