GMusic Google Music App Review

By Sam Costello. iPhone/iPod Expert

Sam Costello has been writing about technology since 2000. He has published articles with CNN.com, PC World, InfoWorld, and Computerworld, among others. For those magazines and websites, he covered digital copyright, the rise and fall of Napster, mobile devices, and computer and network security. He has written about PDAs, monitors, and printers for Samsung's consumer websites.

Streaming means songs don't take up space on your iPhone

And since Google's store is tightly integrated with its cloud-based Google Music player, using it means having access to your music anywhere you have an Internet connection, whether or not you've saved songs to your iPhone.

While Google Music has a web version, iOS users who prefer apps may want to give gMusic a look. It's not perfect—a few bugs may prevent you from enjoying music sometimes—but it's a very good way to listen to your Google Music library on the go.

GMusic is only a player, not a store, so you'll need to do your purchasing in a browser. Once you do, though, accessing your music is very simple. Just fire up the app, log in with your Google account, and your library will begin to download (though if your library is empty, gMusic doesn't let you know that; mine was empty due to some strangeness related to downloading previous purchases, but I didn't realize that, so I waited a few minutes while it seemed to be loading. A warning would be nice).

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Loading of your library is generally quick and, when it's happened once, you won't need to do it again unless your library has been updated. When you add a new song to your Google Music account, just pull down the gMusic screen and it will update your library. During testing, when I added a song at Google Music, it showed up in gMusic in mere seconds.

Just Like iTunes

Once your library has been downloaded, using gMusic is very similar to using the iOS's Music app. You can navigate your library by artist, album, playlist, song, or genre. When you find something you want to listen to, tap on it to play.

When you do, the song is streamed to your phone from your Google Music account, so you need to be online for it to work (gMusic does offer a feature to let you download and save your songs locally to get around this). It's worth remembering that streaming high-quality audio (Google Music is encoded at 320 kbps ) over the Internet can be data intensive and thus you have the potential for using a lot of data. If you've got a 2GB or less data plan. you may want to be careful about how much streaming vs. local listening you do.

Regardless, whether you're streaming or playing from a file saved to your phone, the music sounds great. I couldn't hear any quality difference in streamed songs vs. those stored in my Music app.

In comparison to Google Music's web interface, gMusic is easier and quicker to navigate and seems to generally load songs faster. For most of us, I'd say that justifies the $2 price.

However, gMusic isn't perfect—and its nature as a streaming app is its main weakness.

Occasional Buggy-ness

Because gMusic streams music to you by default, your experience with it will be heavily dependent on the availability of Wi-Fi or 3G networks nearby.

In my first day of testing the app, it was barely usable over both Wi-Fi and 3G. Songs would hardly play 10 seconds before cutting off, album art wouldn't download, the song's progress bar would move but no audio would play at all.

In testing in the same location (my train ride to work) another day, I experienced none of those problems. It's hard to account for this other than to write it off to the complexities and vagaries of wireless networks. The train had roughly the same number of people on it each time and I tested both times using 3G, 3G with my MacBook Air tethered to my phone, and Wi-Fi.

What this goes to prove, I think, is that network availability and capacity still isn't as perfect as providers would like us to believe and that if you're planning to host all your music in the cloud and stream it, you need to be prepared to put up with some frustrations. Those frustrations are a bit out of the hands of gMusic's developers, but they're still worth knowing about before you start using the app.

I also noticed, unrelated to network capacity, that songs tend to cut off 2-3 second before they actually finish when using gMusic. Not a major issue since that time is silent in a lot of songs, but it's a small issue that would be nice to see fixed.

The Bottom Line

If you're a Google Music user, you should check out gMusic. While it's not a perfect app, it offers a better experience than the web-based Google Music and makes listening to your Google Music on your iOS device a snap.

What You'll Need

An iPhone, iPod touch, or iPad running iOS 4.1 or higher. and a Google Music account.

Mopidy-GMusic 1

Mopidy extension for playing music from Google Play Music

Mopidy-GMusic is currently kept on life support by the Mopidy core developers. It is in need of a more dedicated maintainer.

If you want to be the maintainer of Mopidy-GMusic, please:

1. Make 2-3 good pull requests improving any part of the project.
2. Read and get familiar with all of the project’s open issues.
3. Send a pull request removing this section and adding yourself as the “Current maintainer” in the “Credits” section below. In the pull request description, please refer to the previous pull requests and state that you’ve familiarized yourself with the open issues.

As a maintainer, you’ll be given push access to the repo and the authority to make releases to PyPI when you see fit.

You must have a Google account, and either:

• have some music uploaded to your Google Play Music library, or
• have a subscription for Google Play Music All Access.

Install the Mopidy-GMusic extension by running:

Before starting Mopidy, you must add your Google username and password to your Mopidy configuration file:

If you use 2-step verification to access your Google account, which you should, you must create an application password in your Google account for Mopidy-GMusic. See Google’s docs on how to make an app password if you’re not already familiar with this.

All Access subscribers may enable All Access integration by adding this line:

By default, the bitrate is set to 160 kbps. You can change this to either 128 or 320 kbps by setting:

All Access radios are available as browsable content or playlist. The following are the default config values:

Google Play Music requires all clients to provide a device ID. By default, Mopidy-GMusic will use your system’s MAC address as the device ID. As Google puts some limits on how many different devices you can associate with an account, you might want to control what device ID is used. You can set the gmusic/deviceid config to e.g. the device ID from your phone where you also use Google Play Music:

The Android device ID is a 16 character long string identifying the Android device registered for Google Play Music, excluding the 0x prefix. You can obtain this ID by dialing *#*#8255#*#* on your phone (see the aid) or using this app (see the Google Service Framework ID Key).

On iOS the device ID is an UUID with the ios: prefix included. (TODO: Include instructions on how to retrieve this.)

The extension is enabled by default if all dependencies are available. You can simply browse through your library and search for tracks, albums, and artists. Google Play Music playlists are imported as well. You can even add songs from your All Access subscription to your library. Mopidy will able to play them.

GMusic app gives Google Music a touch of Windows 8 style

02/08/2013 at 8:00 AM by Brad Linder

Google Music lets you upload up to 20,000 songs to the cloud and stream your music to any PC with a web browser or to an Android device with the Play Music app. While Google doesn’t offer an official Windows 8 app, there’s a 3rd party app called gMusic which makes Google’s music service feel like it was built for Windows 8.

When you fire up gMusic and login to your Google account, it will fill the screens with icons for your playlists, artists, albums, and more.

You can dig into sub-menus by tapping any icon and play tracks or add them to a queue with a few taps. Swipe down from the top of the screen to bring up playback controls and shortcuts to skip to your queue or return to other menus.

But what really makes gMusic worth the price of admission (which happens to be free), is the search functionality.

From the home screen you can just start typing and the app will start bringing up search results, whether you’re entering an artist or album name or a song title.

The app also supports Windows 8 snapping, allowing you to snap gMusic into a small window on the side of your screen so you can see the song that’s currently playing and controls to pause, play, and skip tracks.

While the basic gMusic app is free, it includes advertisements in both the full screen view and the snap view. You can upgrade to an ad-free experience with a $1.99 in-app purchase. There’s also a $4.99 “ultimate” package which the developer promises will eventually bring additional features… but for now all it does is remove advertisements.

GMusic: Google Music уже в App Store

Припоминаете еще Google Music. Точно, это было как раз в мае месяце - вышла первая бета нового музыкального сервиса от Google. Пользователи получили возможность загрузить на сервера поискового гиганта до 20.000 песен, которые потом становились доступными с любого браузера. Основной причиной недостаточной популярности данного сервиса для всех, имеющих  iДевайсы, было то, что до сегодняшнего дня не существовало соответствующей утилиты под iOS. И вот, сегодня в App Store появилась gMusic .

Интерфейс очень похож на таковой в iOS приложении Музыка - вы можете сортировать треки по плейлистам, исполнителям, альбомам и даже жанрам. Вот короткая цитата из официального прес-релиза:

gMusic это единственная в своем роде iOS утилита, с помощью которой вы можете полноценно пользоваться сервисом Google Music. Загрузив до 20 000 ваших любимых песен на сервера Google, вы сможете всегда наслаждать своей любимой музыкой, а она не будет занимать места на вашем iOS девайсе.

Довольно странно, почему купертиновцы пропустили эту утилиту в App Store, ведь Google Music, по сути, является прямым конкурентом сервису iTunes Match .

Как бы там ни было, всего за неполных 2 доллара всех меломанов ждет "непочатий край роботи"!

For android - GmHttpClient post() returns null - Stack Overflow

I am using gmusic.api for android as a library project for my android application. For authentication purpose I have copied an AsyncTask named GoogleAuthTask from here.

From this AsyncTask there is a call to static login() method on GoogleMusicApi class.

If I go into this method & print response of post() call, it returns null. Same is the case for any call to this post(). For example if I make a call to getAllSongs(), it has post() call which again returns null.

Am I missing something here? I didn't find any such exact example using these functions.

Edit: Since response of post() call is null always, I get following stacktrace when calling getAllSongs():

12-04 14:33:36.640: E/AndroidRuntime(29132): java.lang.RuntimeException: An error occured while executing doInBackground() 12-04 14:33:36.640: E/AndroidRuntime(29132): at android.os.AsyncTask$3.done(AsyncTask.java:278) 12-04 14:33:36.640: E/AndroidRuntime(29132): at java.util.concurrent.FutureTask$Sync.innerSetException(FutureTask.java:273) 12-04 14:33:36.640: E/AndroidRuntime(29132): at java.util.concurrent.FutureTask.setException(FutureTask.java:124) 12-04 14:33:36.640: E/AndroidRuntime(29132): at java.util.concurrent.FutureTask$Sync.innerRun(FutureTask.java:307) 12-04 14:33:36.640: E/AndroidRuntime(29132): at java.util.concurrent.FutureTask.run(FutureTask.java:137) 12-04 14:33:36.640: E/AndroidRuntime(29132): at android.os.AsyncTask$SerialExecutor$1.run(AsyncTask.java:208) 12-04 14:33:36.640: E/AndroidRuntime(29132): at java.util.concurrent.ThreadPoolExecutor.runWorker(ThreadPoolExecutor.java:1076) 12-04 14:33:36.640: E/AndroidRuntime(29132): at java.util.concurrent.ThreadPoolExecutor$Worker.run(ThreadPoolExecutor.java:569) 12-04 14:33:36.640: E/AndroidRuntime(29132): at java.lang.Thread.run(Thread.java:856) 12-04 14:33:36.640: E/AndroidRuntime(29132): Caused by: java.lang.NullPointerException 12-04 14:33:36.640: E/AndroidRuntime(29132): at org.json.JSONTokener.nextCleanInternal(JSONTokener.java:116) 12-04 14:33:36.640: E/AndroidRuntime(29132): at org.json.JSONTokener.nextValue(JSONTokener.java:94) 12-04 14:33:36.640: E/AndroidRuntime(29132): at org.json.JSONObject.(JSONObject.java:154) 12-04 14:33:36.640: E/AndroidRuntime(29132): at org.json.JSONObject.(JSONObject.java:171) 12-04 14:33:36.640: E/AndroidRuntime(29132): at com.android.gm.api.GoogleMusicApi.getSongs(GoogleMusicApi.java:146) 12-04 14:33:36.640: E/AndroidRuntime(29132): at com.android.gm.api.GoogleMusicApi.getAllSongs(GoogleMusicApi.java:134) 12-04 14:33:36.640: E/AndroidRuntime(29132): at com.example.testgmusic.MainActivity$GoogleAuthTask.doInBackground(MainActivity.java:100) 12-04 14:33:36.640: E/AndroidRuntime(29132): at com.example.testgmusic.MainActivity$GoogleAuthTask.doInBackground(MainActivity.java:1) 12-04 14:33:36.640: E/AndroidRuntime(29132): at android.os.AsyncTask$2.call(AsyncTask.java:264) 12-04 14:33:36.640: E/AndroidRuntime(29132): at java.util.concurrent.FutureTask$Sync.innerRun(FutureTask.java:305) 12-04 14:33:36.640: E/AndroidRuntime(29132). 5 more

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