A month or so ago Google opened up its music service to other countries other than the USA.
I jumped with joy. I downloaded the software and started the procedure of uploading my 10,000 songs. Well what endured was a painfully slow upload along with Google’s server crashing. After 22 days non stop uploading my collection was all in place. Along the way I did curse with it taking so long. My thoughts for waiting so long was two fold.
Firstly, I would have my entire music collection in the cloud which would act as a backup. As Google don’t charge for the first 20,000 songs its a free backup. Also Google stream the music at a much higher bit rate than Apple and Amazon. I rip all my CDs at 320 bit rate, and this is the same rate Google use. Apple and Amazon are at a max of 254. Whilst that might not sound a big difference it actually does make a big difference. Instruments are clearer, in fact the whole sound spectrum improves noticeably.
I have been reluctant to move away from physical CDs as I like holding and then adding to my collection on the bookcase. It feels like you have something. However, sometimes I have downloaded the odd album or song. So as we download more, so does cloud storing of our media become more common.
So for the first time since that big upload, I’ve put being using Google Music non stop today. I am playing my entire collection in shuffle mode. And it’s just works. And my iPad’s memory has not been used to store any of the songs. Nor could it fit all 10,000 songs. So being able to stream my music at a high bit rate has been very enjoyable. If only the upload had been faster.
So long as you have access to unlimited internet you can have access to all your songs and play them. This in turns negates the need for huge memory sizes on tablets or phones for storing.
I do wonder what would happen if the internet got hacked. Sometimes local offline storage is simpler and safer.
Have you used or do you use a streaming service? Do you feel safe using it? Is if the future?
Gavin's Gadgets & Photography 
It is painful doing the initial upload, but your speeds were just off the hook crazy slow. I uploaded by 5500 or so songs in a day but I do have a 4 meg upload stream which works well most of the time. But in the end it seems that you found it worthwhile. Being able to have access to all your music on multiple devices, and for free no less, is absolutely wonderful. And because Google streams at 320 as you mentioned the quality of the stream is higher than with iTunes Match.
Since, like you, most of my music is from CDs and I have all the CDs still (albeit in storage), I’m not worried about losing my music if something happens to the stuff in the cloud. For music that I only have in digital form, I do have two physical backups (on my NAS and on the backup of the NAS) so I think the risk of losing anything is relatively small.
The cloud makes it possible for me to use devices with small amount of physical storage. My iPod Touch is 32 gigs, but no music is stored on it. My Note 2 has a 32 gig card, but no music is stored on it. And my Nexus 7 has 16 GB storage and again, no music is stored on it. Having the music in Google Play relieves me of having to worry about physical storage space on my devices.
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