Download the google play music app. Google Play Music: what is it, how can I install it on my phone and upload my music to the cloud? Download the desired song to your computer

In Russia. For 169 rubles per month you can get full access. The problem is that Google only provides the ability to listen to music either from mobile devices or through a browser.
However, this does not suit many people, for example me. Therefore, in this article we will consider possible “unofficial” ways of listening to music from Google Play Music.

So, we have a Raspberry Pi with installed server MPD. We want to be able to remotely play any music from our music library in Google Play Music on this Raspberry Pi.

Option to start a vnc server with running browser We don't consider it. I tried to run chromium and midori without an X server and a window manager, but it still slows down a lot. The music.google.com web application is still quite heavy.

There is no official API for Google Play Music, but there is an excellent Unofficial-Google-Music-API on github, written in Python. The author of this API, Simon Weber, recommends several projects that use his API. Consider the ones that interested me:

In addition to these projects you can also find:

It is worth noting that all projects are written in Python. Below I will describe my experience with each of these projects.

thunner

Curses client. Plays music through mplayer. Sounds great, but doesn't work. To begin with, I had to switch to a branch that had been modified to work with latest version API, version from master is not working. But the music still plays for only a second, then switches to the next song. Actually, we can observe the following unresolved problem All-Access Songs Not Playing, which means it’s not just me.

GMusicFS

FUSE file system. When mounted, we get the directory hierarchy of our music library from Google Play Music in the format artists/ //plus cover.jpg is loaded. Well, the ability to have your entire music library in mp3 format in a directory is just great, but there are a number of sad limitations.
As the author writes, this solution is only suitable for copying files to your computer or for playing with a simple player such as mplayer. When trying to play in more advanced players, problems may occur. And indeed, when you try to open a collection, even in a simple mocp, it starts to freeze a lot, and it’s impossible to listen to music. When I try to specify a directory as a library for MPD, I get the opportunity to listen to music, but the tags did not load for me, and listening to songs with the same name “Unknown” is of course not an option. The author also notes the inability to play a song from a certain position.

You can install GMusicFS using pip, after installing the dependencies:

pip install github.com/terencehonles/fusepy/tarball/master
pip install github.com/simon-weber/Unofficial-Google-Music-API/tarball/develop
pip install github.com/EnigmaCurry/GMusicFS/tarball/master

Then you need to create a configuration file ~/.gmusicfs with the following contents:


username = [email protected]
password = your_password

And you can mount:

mkdir -p $HOME/google_music
gmusicfs$HOME/google_music

To unmount:

fusermount -u $HOME/google_music

When copying music to your computer, all tags are loaded correctly. Playing with mplayer also works fine. After updating the music library, you need to remount the file system.

GMusicProxy

The project description says the following: “Let's stream Google Play Music using any media-player.”
This script allows you to receive m3u playlists or mp3 files by sending specially crafted GET requests.

You can install it with the following command:

pip install github.com/diraimondo/gmusicproxy/tarball/master

To work, you need the device-id of one of the registered devices. You can get a list of these devices as follows:

GMusicProxy --email<адрес>--password<пароль>--list-devices

Create a config ~/.config/gmusicproxy.cfg:

email = [email protected]
password = my-secret-password
device-id = 54bbd32a309a34ef

Let's launch:

Examples of use using the mpc console client

curl -s "http://localhost:9999/get_by_search?type=album&artist=Queen&title=Greatest%20Hits" >
/var/lib/mpd/playlists/queen.m3u
mpc load queen
mpc play

MPc clear
curl -s "http://localhost:9999/get_new_station_by_search?type=artist&artist=Queen&num_tracks=100" |
grep -v ^# | while read url; do mpc add "$url"; done
mpc play

Examples of use using VLC

vlc "http://localhost:9999/get_by_search?type=album&artist=Rolling%20Stones&title=tattoo&exact=no"
curl -s "http://localhost:9999/get_all_stations?format=text&only_url=yes" | sort -R | head -n1 | vlc-

A wide variety of requests are supported: getting songs, radio stations, playlists,…
The downside is that you need to create all these requests yourself, and also that tags are loaded only when a specific song is played.

play-pi

Web frontend on Django for accessing the music library with integration into MPD. Let me just say that I had the same problem as with thunner - it only plays for a second.

Cantata unfortunately does not connect.

conclusions

Perfect for copying music from Google Play Music in mp3 format. Can be used with a plugin for playback.

I settled on running MPD and Mopidy simultaneously on different ports and connecting with different clients (Cantata and GMPC). MPD for local collection, Mopidy for Google Play Music.

Don't forget that when using two-factor authentication, you need to create application passwords in your Google Account settings.

To store your music library and gain access to new recordings. This music service has practically no weaknesses, with the exception of one trouble - it only works in the browser. Therefore, if you want to listen to music, you will have to keep Chrome or Firefox open, even if you don’t need them right now. You can solve this problem and also get a number of additional bonuses using the Google Play Music Desktop Player application.

As the name suggests, Google Play Music Desktop Player is a desktop player that allows you to access Google's music service. It is an open source program for Windows, Mac and Linux, created by independent developers. You can download it at this address.

First of all, after starting the program, you will need to enter your Google account information. After this, the player will have access to the music library and you can start playing. By default, Google Play Music Desktop Player has a light theme with orange elements, but you can enable dark theme combined with a different color scheme in the application settings.

In addition to various design options, you will find several more useful features in Google Play Music Desktop Player. Here is their list:

  • support for media keys (play, pause, stop, previous track, next track);
  • scrobbling information about listened songs in Last.fm;
  • notifications about track changes;
  • a beautiful mini-player that can be displayed on top of all windows;
  • the ability to control playback using a button on the Windows taskbar;
  • HTML5 Audio support;
  • built-in equalizer;
  • customizable hotkeys.

As you can see, some of the features of Google Play Music Desktop Player look very tempting. But the most important advantage of this program is, undoubtedly, the ability to save computer resources due to the fact that you do not need to keep the standard browser open all the time.

On Google days launched its music service in Ukraine Play Music. With tempting conditions, more than 20 million compositions, 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. The Play Music service combines a cloud library of more than 20 million tracks and 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):

  1. Download audio files to your computer
  2. Import files into iTunes
  3. Connect iPhone or iPad to computer
  4. Mark the required files
  5. Start synchronization

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

  1. Search for a suitable album/track in the player on your device
  2. 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 Genres, Interesting, Recommended and New sections and brings you a barrage of new music to suit 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 mini player looks like Chrome browser

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’m offering 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 quantity used memory It’s hard to see, but this bug will definitely 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 took care of handy tool to transfer music from iTunes to Play Music. A very good move.

  • In this material I want to tell you how I switched to using music service from Google instead of listening to a collection of music on your computer using your 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 configure auto-start playback when the player is launched, 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 your 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?

    1. The ability to listen online to all tracks presented on Google Play Music (more than 18 million tracks)
    2. The ability to download an unlimited number of tracks to your computer or any smartphone and listen to them offline, without an Internet connection
    3. The ability to listen to radio stations based on your preferences for music genres, albums, and so on
    4. 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 also 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 the covers on Google Play Music is not yet very good, and it doesn’t look very good on a high-resolution monitor.





    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 recommendation system 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. Some will find free analogues, while others will decide to pay 100-200 rubles a month for a 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 ()

    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 as a regular program, but music from Google Play users they can download it 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.

    Exists Alternative option for Chrome browser users. 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.