Google has updated the Music Manager for its cloud-based music service. While you could previously use the manager to upload as many as 20,000 songs to Google Music or to download tracks you’d purchased from the service — now you can use it to download the songs you’ve uploaded.
In other words, you can use Google Music to backup your music library, stream it to any computer with a web browser or to your Android phone or tablet, and download your music to a PC.
So you can create a backup of your music collection using Google Music and re-download it if your hard drive crashes, you laptop is stolen, or you buy a new PC.
Unfortunately there’s no easy way to download just a few songs at a time using the music manager. What happens when you click the “Download my library” button is that Google asks you what folder you’d like to store your music in, and then is starts to download all of your songs.
But you can download individual tracks or albums from the Google Music website.
I’m guessing everything is 320kbps MP3 when you download it, regardless of what they were before you uploaded them?
I didn’t feel like downloading a few thousand songs to find out for sure — but when I use the web-based download tool, songs seem to be encoded at the same bitrate as I used to upload them.
One file I checked was 128kbps when I uploaded and the same when I downloaded. Another was 192kbps. It looks like this is a real music locker rather than links to an iTunes-in-the-cloud style music library.
Ah, I was thinking of non-MP3 uploads – specifically AAC as iTunes uses. I’m in the process of uploading my collection now, it has been running for a couple of days. Right now 9,574 of 16,069 and counting. And all of my music is 128 or 256kbps AAC – ripped or purchased. Google Music re-encodes everything to MP3 for streaming, and from the docs they use 320kbps MP3 for maximum quality. I guess it makes sense that they wouldn’t re-encode anything already in MP3 format.
yeah, its really a fabulous process, The innovation of Google Music brought a popular on-line library tool.
whether it is applicable to both audio and video file format?