Got my invite to the google music beta this morning and started trying it out.
The initial scan of my media library went fairly quickly, in part because it looks like they are just doing a search for media files by type during the first pass, and not actually attempting to parse them until they add them to your library. This of course means that it gives me the annoying “we’re going to load a random selection of your library because it’s too big for us”, with no way to tell it which tracks/artists/albums to prioritize. And the loading process is slow. It’s been running since 8am this morning and is only 900 songs in (it says it’s going to load 20,000 eventually). It’s not clear if checking the “free music” buttons during setup means I’ve given up some of the 20k slots to their music, or if I’ll end up with 20k of mine plus the freebies. In another 80 hours we will see where things are at, I guess.
UPDATE: 27 hours later and we’re all the way up to 7000 songs.
It’s also not impressing me with the way it randomly decides to split an album into two entities even though all the visible metadata matches. While editing metadata for an individual track was obvious, it’s not clear how to merge two albums that should be one, or to fix the same data for multiple tracks at the same time.
Will have to give a fuller evaluation once it’s finished the loading process, and I can see how well they select from my music.
