How to download Google Play Music to your computer: some practical tips. My experience using Google Play Music or "Goodbye iTunes"

Now officially available in Russia. Naturally, we could not miss such an important event, and therefore we have prepared instructions for you on how to connect to Google Play Music from scratch to listening to songs. Go.

Connection

So, if you go to Google Play now, you will find in the left corner new tab called "Music".

When you go to this section, Google will warmly welcome you to its new service and ask you to accept the terms of use. We agree.

Tariff selection

Now you need to select your subscription type. We have access to a standard account (free), as well as “full access” (trial + subscriber after a month of free testing).

Free plan includes the ability to upload 20 thousand tracks from your own music collection to the music cloud, buy music on Google Play and synchronize all this with your Android mobile device.

Paid tariff includes all the free features + access to the entire Play Music library (more than 18 million tracks), user-configurable radio with the ability to switch tracks and thematic playlists compiled by live music experts. All this fun can be tested for free for 30 days, after which you will have to pay 189 rubles per month (169 rubles if you subscribe before November 15).

We decided to test everything step by step, so we initially abandoned the trial full access(you can still connect it later). In the end, not everyone will want to pay for this service, and first of all we are interested in what Play Music can do without investing financially in it.

Google Wallet

So, the standard account is selected, and now Google offers to configure it.

The essence of the setup is to link it to your Google Wallet account. If you don't have a wallet yet, you'll have to create one now. No need to worry. Despite the loud name “Google Wallet”, the essence of the process comes down to simply indicating your address and postal data and linking bank card. In the future, you can access your Google Wallet at https://wallet.google.com/.

Attention! When registering a wallet, a trial 30 rubles will be debited from your bank card, which will be safely returned to the same card after a short period of time. There's no need to panic.

Download music

We are done with registration in the service. It's time to put music into the cloud. For these purposes, Google suggests installing “Download Manager” - a small desktop client that will pick up an existing user music library from iTunes, Windows Media or local folder computer, after which it will flood it all to itself.

During the uploading process, Play Music analyzes the tracks, and if there is already a track uploaded by the user in its own music library, then it will simply be instantly loaded into the user’s music library from the Play Music server, but with a beautiful picture.

Now we indicate the place from where the manager needs to pull the tracks. In our case, this is a local folder.

In the future, the download manager will sit in the tray, and the user will be able to download new tracks to the cloud at any time, or set up automatic downloading from certain computer folders through the manager settings.

Once the process of loading the music library into Play Music has begun, you can immediately go to the web interface of the service and start exploring it.

Web interface

In fact, everything here is very standard and can be mastered in just a couple of minutes. We have home page, where a random tiled vinaigrette from the music we have already downloaded is located.

When you go to the “Music Library” section, our music collection opens. The presentation of the collection is expectedly implemented through a list of artists, albums, a general list of tracks and genres.

At the bottom of the interface is the player panel. It works regardless of the page content and allows you to freely navigate the web service while maintaining playback of the current song.

Automixes are the automated creation of a thematic playlist based on a specific composition. There is also a complete random option “I’m feeling lucky”, in which the service itself instantly creates a sheet based on random parameters.

Google Play - goes to the music store. Everything is clear here.

Among other items, it is worth highlighting “From friends”. Google decided to socialize their music machine as much as possible and provided the opportunity for friends to play music downloaded from Play.

That's all. Other functions of the service, such as compiling playlists and playback queues, are probably familiar to absolutely everyone and do not require detailed description. When combined with an intuitive interface, explaining these functions becomes even more irrelevant. The same can be said about the Play Music settings - there are quite a few of them and they are quite obvious.

Most owners of Android smartphones actively use Google Play to buy and listen to licensed music. It's convenient and fast on your smartphone. At the same time, many users ask the question whether it is possible to download Google Play Music. Unlike iTunes, Google's service cannot be downloaded to your computer in the form regular program, however, users can download music from Google Play to their Personal Computer. Standard functions allow you to do this.

Why do you need to download songs?

The music service from Google has wide functionality, a user-friendly interface, and it is completely free. A significant drawback is the inability to listen to music without. Thus, all your purchases become unavailable. For this reason there is a need download to computer all tracks from Google Play Music . By doing this, you won't have to log into your browser every time and turn on your music library to listen. It will be enough just to launch the song on your computer.

If the song has not yet been purchased

You can download your favorite tracks only if they have already been purchased. If your music library is empty, then naturally there will be nothing to download. To buy your favorite music track, you need to follow these steps:

Only after this you will be able to download songs to your computer. You can do this either one song at a time or download the entire music library. We will talk about this in more detail later.

Download the desired song to your computer

Once you have purchased all the necessary music tracks, you will be able to download them. To download purchased music from Play Music, you need to follow these steps;

Be careful, as you can only download each track 1 or 2 times. After this, you can easily listen to your favorite songs even offline. The file is downloaded in mp3 format, so you can listen to it not only on your computer, but also on various mobile devices. Also, users who have downloaded or listened to a track once do not have the right to request a refund for the song.

How to download the entire music library

The above method is convenient only if you need to download one or more songs. However, if your music library contains hundreds of songs, downloading each one individually is extremely tedious and inefficient. Google specialists foresaw this problem, so they created a special download manager, which you can download on the official website.

To use this program, follow the steps below:

After this, the manager will start the download. The program allows you to download all the songs to your computer in just a few minutes.

There is an alternative option for users Chrome browser. The developers have created a special add-on, thanks to which you can just as quickly download songs from your music library to your computer. To do this, follow these steps:

First, in the browser settings itself, you should go to the “Experimental functions” submenu. You need to enable the corresponding Google Play Music item. The application also allows you to quickly add tracks to your music library, after which you can listen to them on your mobile device.

In this article I want to tell you how I switched to using Google's music service instead of listening to a collection of music on my computer using my favorite player. But first, a small digression. I listen to music all the time, at home, at work (I work mostly from home), on the way to a meeting or somewhere else, on flights, and so on. Everywhere. At the same time, at home, all the music is stored, naturally, on the computer, collected over the years, lovingly sorted into folders, the correct tags were written, album covers were searched, in a word, everything is as it should be. With the player for Windows, where you could listen to all this, there have been several changes over the past 5-6 years. At first I used WinAmp, like most people in Russia with computers. Maybe. Then I switched to Foobar, not because of the sound quality, like many, but simply because at that time it was this player that made it possible to get a convenient tree structure of all music with folders, plus there were many possibilities for changes appearance player. At one time, my main player was even iTunes, but since there is no worse player in the world (especially for those who store music in folders and are used to choosing music in folders, and not by searching or through categories), I quickly “jumped” from it. . In the end, I settled on a strange, but, as it turned out, convenient player for me personally, JRiver Media Center, in which you can set up auto-start playback when the player starts, work with folders, enable search and download missing album covers from the network. I wrote all this so that you can understand that I really listen to music a lot and until recently I could not imagine that I would suddenly abandon my collection and my convenient player on my computer in favor of Google Play Music. But that's what happened.

We have already written about the official launch of Google’s music service in Russia and some of its features. In this article I will tell you about everything Google features Play Music, the pros and cons, and why I now use this online service.

Subscription

The most important thing about Google Play Music and the main reason that the service is so convenient and useful is the availability of a subscription. If you do not activate a monthly subscription, then the cost of a track is about 15 rubles, and an album – 150-200 rubles. The prices may be normal, but they are not very familiar to us. I want to say that it’s one thing to buy physical media for that amount and another thing to buy several megabytes of music. In Russia they are not used to this yet. And this is where a subscription will help.

If you subscribe before mid-November, you will need to pay 169 rubles monthly, if after mid-November - 189 rubles. What do you get for subscription fee 170 or 190 rubles?

The ability to listen online to all tracks presented on Google Play Music (more than 18 million tracks)
The ability to download an unlimited number of tracks to your computer or any smartphone and listen to them offline, without an Internet connection
The ability to listen to radio stations based on your preferences for music genres, albums, and so on
The ability to upload to the cloud and then listen online from a smartphone, tablet, computer or laptop anywhere there is Internet access, up to 20,000 tracks

The last point also applies if you use the service without a subscription. But the whole point is that if without a subscription you need to buy tracks, then by subscribing and paying a subscription fee once a month, you get all these tracks for the entire subscription period for free. And you can download them to any smartphone in any quantity, that's true.

Interface and features

In my opinion, the main drawback of the service now is the lack of a client for Windows, Mac, Linux. That is, you need to listen to music in a browser window and, accordingly, a number of minor disadvantages are associated with this: you cannot control playback from the keyboard, like in any local player, there are no sound settings, there are no interface presentation settings, and much more. However, the browser version of the service is already quite suitable for regular use.

In the service window on the left there is a small menu with several important sections, this is the “Home” page, where the last listened tracks are displayed, and there is a “You will like” button; by clicking it, you will turn on the playback of tracks selected by the service, taking into account your preferences. There is “My Music Library”, where the tracks you downloaded to the cloud and to your devices are stored. There is a “Browse”, a kind of library, here you can search for any tracks in different genres and subgenres.

The Radio section allows you to listen to music similar to a specific artist or genre. Here the system collects selections recommended to you, made on the basis of information collected by the service about what you listen to. Accordingly, the more time you use Google Play Music, the more accurately this system will work and the more suitable tracks it will collect into collections. I’ll tell you about myself, I’ve already found several interesting collections here, and if you listen to a collection and you don’t like some track in it, you can give it a one (on a five-point rating scale), the track will be excluded from the selection, and this rating will be counted system when compiling future collections.

The playlist screen for a specific artist's track list also contains recommendations for artists playing in a similar style, as well as the artist's albums and compilations, naturally.

You can view a list of tracks in an album or collection, or enable full-screen cover art. True, the quality of covers on Google Play Music is not very good yet, and on a monitor with high resolution it doesn't look very good.

In the settings, you can go to the “Laboratory” and install a couple of add-ons there. There is hope that in the future, for the service, like for Gmail, for example, a large number of high-quality additions will appear. So far I have found only one useful thing there - notifications about playing tracks in the system tray (for Windows).

For Windows systems There is a special client with which you can upload tracks from your computer to the cloud. It works very simply - you specify the player from whose database you want to download tracks or specific folders on your computer, then the process of uploading them to the server begins.

Google Play Music on a smartphone

Smartphone app on Android based its capabilities resemble a service in a browser window. The main disadvantage here is exactly the same as on a PC - you can listen to music, even downloaded to the device, only using this program; you will not see these tracks in any other player. Another drawback so far is the impossibility of choosing a place to download tracks, that is, all this is loaded into a predetermined folder in internal memory devices. For smartphones with a small amount of built-in memory and flash cards, this minus is especially critical.

Conclusion

In my opinion, with the arrival of Google Play Music in Russia, two services will at some point have a very difficult time - firstly, Yandex.Music, secondly, free music in social network"In contact with". Yandex.Music and Google Play Music are similar in many ways - both subscription services allow you to listen to a huge amount of music online. And yet, Yandex’s music database is more modest, for some this does not matter, but I, for example, immediately encountered this disadvantage. If in Google Play Music I find all the albums of my favorite group “Anathema”, then in Yandex.Music I find only two albums. In terms of capabilities, the service from Yandex is also weaker for now - there is no such system of recommendations and “radio”, it all looks simpler and not so beautiful and visual. As for free tracks on the VKontakte network, it is obvious that sooner or later the shop will be closed, and then millions of users who are accustomed to listening to music online will have to look for new sources. Someone will find free analogues, and someone will decide to pay 100-200 rubles per month for quality service from Google, Yandex or someone else.

And most importantly, it seems to me that Google Play Music has already become a full-fledged replacement for the music collection on a computer for everyone who likes to listen to music and listens to it constantly, but at the same time is not too demanding on the quality of the tracks, does not collect everything in lossless formats and does not has super-acoustics, an amplifier and other things for “real clear sound.” That is why for me Google Play Music has already become such a replacement for music on my computer’s hard drive.

Artem Lutfullin ()

On Google days launched its own music service in Ukraine Play Music. With tempting conditions, more than 20 million songs database, intelligent software solutions, and even with a very positive assessment from users in countries where the service has been present for a long time. There was no way to ignore the new product, so I put aside my favorites along with the local library and music from Vkontakte and took up the test. But Play Music turned out to be not just an interesting product - the service once and for all changed my music listening pattern, and at the same time made music solutions from Apple completely unnecessary, untied my iPhone and iPad from iTunes, and left no chance for music piracy. Do you think it’s too much for one product, even a leading player?

Google Play Music is available with a monthly subscription, and it opens up all the possibilities - access to every track, album, collection stored in the library, downloading songs to devices, synchronizing libraries, recommended and custom radio stations with flexible settings. And for this “full stuffing” they ask for 59 UAH 49 UAH per month, at the current exchange rate - $4.2. That is, the amount is not at all burdensome for the majority, for iPhone and iPad owners for sure.

In general, Google did not reinvent the wheel. Play service Music combines a cloud-based library of more than 20 million tracks with customizable online radio (much like iTunes Radio). You can access music from your computer browser or through applications for mobile platforms. On iOS this is the Play Music [iTunes] player, which I will talk about in more detail below. Traditionally for cloud solutions, most actions take place online, which guarantees instant data synchronization between all devices. Whether it's adding a new album to My Library, liking a track, or creating a new playlist.

But Google didn't limit itself to the "classics". The main advantage of Play Music is that you can download any tracks, collections or albums to your device for offline access. Let's compare two scenarios:

How to Add Music to iPhone or iPad Using iTunes (Without iTunes Match Subscription):

Download audio files to your computer
Import files into iTunes
Connect iPhone or iPad to computer
Mark the required files
Start synchronization

How to add music to iPhone or iPad using Play Music:

Search for a suitable album/track in the player on your device
Click the “Download” icon

Play Music eliminates the need to buy music and with this service there is no point in using different pirated sources. Why waste time searching (plus bother with changing clumsy tags, assigning beautiful covers), and especially pay for each album, if you can just listen? Or download in one touch and listen?

Personally, I haven’t actually updated my music library in the last 3-4 months. On the computer I listened mainly to radio from Apple, created and customized several “stations”, and collected selected tracks on Vkontakte. I tried not to think about the legal side of the issue. There were a dozen proven albums on the iPhone; I was too lazy to look for something new, buy and download it, and then manually sync it. Well, with our mobile internet and numerous “dead zones” (the same metro), it was rare to pamper yourself with streaming music on the road. Play Music has made everything very simple.

How to start using Play Music

Since the service is from Google, the first condition for use is the availability account companies. But, due to popularity Gmail, almost every network user has it. The system will also request bank card details, from which in the future (the first month is free) the fee for using the service will be debited.

Google Play Music

The process of creating a Play Music account is completed by selecting your favorite genres and artists. If you take your time and highlight more cool music, Play Music will delight you with excellent selections from the very first minutes. Naturally, not only those musicians who were noted by you, but many others similar in style and mood.

Play Music player

Or rather players, because the service is available both in the browser and on mobile platforms. But the interface is the same everywhere, except that on iOS and Android there are “Download” buttons.

The player includes several sections: My Music Library, Playlists, Radio and Review. The applications also have filtering based on available offline content, which is convenient.

Music library And playlists not much different from most players. Filtering by genres, artists, albums, tracks is not forgotten, there is a search. Unless the playlists include both those created by you and those recommended based on the already formed “musical history”.

Radio stations extremely flexible. They can be formed from albums, artists, tracks and genres, Play Music offers a variety of thematic selections. But there are no stations from famous personalities and companies, like in iTunes. Otherwise, everything is no worse, but there are more opportunities. Firstly, the list of tracks of the “radio station” can be adjusted at your discretion: swap songs, delete unwanted ones. Secondly, songs can be downloaded to the device into the Music Library and added to a playlist. Or go to the song album and add it to your audio collection.

Menu Review designed to expand the musical horizons of the service user. It includes sections Genres, Interesting, Recommended and New and pleases with a flurry of new music according to your preferences. In two days, thanks to the Review alone, I discovered seven new performers. I’m writing this material and cheering myself up with the album “Mandatory Fun” from “Weird Al” Yankovic. I very much doubt that I would have met him anywhere else.

Menu interface playback just awesome. Nothing superfluous, large buttons, mandatory information is in place. In addition, the album cover is not static, but slowly “floats” from left to right and back. There is zero practical benefit, but it looks very impressive. “Like/Dislike” buttons were placed above the cover. You shouldn’t forget about them, because in this way you introduce the system to your musical preferences.

This is what the Chrome browser mini-player looks like

The service and applications have many small useful features; you can’t tell about everything so quickly. It's easier to connect and experience it in person. I’ll just briefly describe storing music on iOS devices, since I offer Play Music as an alternative to the Music player in conjunction with iTunes.

Tracks can be downloaded individually or as entire albums, without exception. Once the download is complete, they are available in the My Library menu, with a small orange icon indicating which content is available offline. Clicking the icon again deletes files from memory; you can also look at the program settings in the “Manage downloaded files” menu and understand the situation more thoroughly. In this version of Play Music, information about the amount of occupied memory is poorly visible, but this bug will clearly be fixed. Here you can delete all tracks with one click.

Total

I've been listening to music very actively for two days. While working on a Mac, drinking a cup of coffee on an iPad, on the road with an iPhone. I’m listening to more and more new artists, experimenting with genres, jumping from albums to radio stations and back again. And so far I haven’t come up with a single reason to give up Play Music and return to the usual scenario - the Music App, iTunes Radio, VKontakte playlists. Perhaps it would be possible to save 49 UAH, but this is some kind of frivolous weak argument.

Google Play Music

P.S. Google has taken care of a convenient tool for transferring music from iTunes to Play Music. A very good move.