Higgins' Hints: Your music on the cloud makes it extra portable

You’re choices for buying and managing your music has grown, again.  Google Music is the next player up and they have done something cool.  You can upload 20,000 songs (except ones with DRM protection) to the Google cloud for FREE.  And it’s not just songs purchased on Google, songs you ripped from your CD’s, songs purchased from iTunes , Amazon , Spotify , and Pandora will work too.  Once your music is on the “Cloud” you can listen to it on any device that has a web browser, so your own music can follow you on your laptop, tablet, android powered phone, or PC.

Go to music/google.com and sign in through any browser and you can start uploading music.  There are a few free songs and albums that are currently being offered so you can start listening to music as quickly as it takes to sign in.  There is one small catch, uploading your music from your PC will take a lot of time, so it’s best to start uploading your songs before you go to bed.  Depending on your internet speed you can upload a few hundred songs per hour, so hitting the 20,000 song limit will take awhile.

When you sign up for Google Music you’ll see the Android Music store , and no you don’t need an Android phone (or any phone) for this service to work (that initially confused me as I was signing in).   If you have a Google+ account (again you don’t need one use this service) you can share your music with your circle of friends.  They can listen to a song you post (only once) for free.

The big drawback to purchasing music via Google/Android store is that they have limited selections of songs.  iTunes has a much bigger selection.  But again you can upload your iTune’s songs to Google Music, so that’s not such a deal breaker for me.  Have you tried Google Music, what do you think, leave a comment below?