Google Music adds some new features!

Hey, I’m a cloud guy.  Yup, you all knew that.

One of my favourite uses for the cloud has been to store my music on it.  And my most viewed post on this site so far has been the “How to get Google Music working in Canada“.  The trick still works if you want to look in to it.  Especially as the app isn’t geo-restricted any more to just the US.

So go get it… it just updated with some cool new features.  Version 4.4.811H

I love the app.  I love being able to be anywhere and have all my files and choose which ones I want to listen to.  Sometimes that takes some pre-planning, else you use up your data plan, but that’s okay.  So, I would spend some time going through my music and making playlists etc, and then making that playlist available on my phone.

Prior to the update yesterday if you wanted to have a specific song or set you could go into the app, make sure that “all music” is on (i.e. uncheck the “on device only” box) and then click menu to “choose music for device”.  This allowed you to save either albums, artists or playlists to your device.

Cool.

But then, not so… what if I really liked just one song by an artist?  Say, Skrillex.  I’m not a ‘dubstep’ fan, but there’s a couple that are good for the bike to work.  My options were to either add an album, or his entire works.  (there was also a way to play one song so that it would stay in the ‘cache’, but that was a short term fix)  Not a great scenario.

I could go into the cloud and remove his other songs… but I’m not one to limit my catalogue, I like having a proper list.  So this meant going into my cloud and making lists and bringing back all the haunted memories of me making mix tapes in grade school and CDs in high school.

Something the Zunes had was a way to ‘heart’ some songs, and then you could sync that list.  Well, Google Music has a “thumbs up” feature, and if you go into the app there’s a tab just for that.  But until the update it wasn’t possible to sync that list, or try to keep only specific songs from ANY list.  It was always album, artist or playlist. Well, do away with that thinking.

The new update allows you to sync the ‘liked’ music to your device, plus it makes it a little easier to see what list you’re looking at:  i.e. is it the ‘on device’ or ‘cloud’.

So, it’s much easier now for me to go through the web app, listening to music and just clicking ‘like’ on anything I know I want to have on my phone.  Sure, I can still keep my other playlists, and even if I make an ‘instant mix’ I can see it in the ‘recent’ tab.

So, I’m excited that it’s updated with some features that I even sent in my suggestions on (I can’t tell you how many times I sent in ‘feedback’ on not being able to sync my ‘likes’), but that it’s no longer geo-restricted. Maybe the service will legitimately come to Canada soon.