Google Play Music Match

How to tell if a song from Google Play Music was uploaded from your computer or it was simply matched with a copy from Google's servers? Click the 3-dot icon next to the song's name in the desktop interface and see if you can find a menu item called "fix incorrect match". If so, you'll listen to Google's version of the song.

"In order to upload your music quickly, Google Play matches your music files with copies on our server. Occassionally we might match with the wrong song. Report the problem here and the song will be corrected to use your copy instead of the matched copy," mentions Google's dialog.

If you click "fix match", you'll get this message: "Please make sure that the computer where you keep this song is running Music Manager and is connected to the internet. The song will be uploaded again within the next day."

Google's copies have a bit rate of 320kbps, so many of your songs will be "upgraded". You can check this by clicking "edit info".

Google Play Music Mini Player and Browser Upload

There's a new experimental feature in Google Play Music Labs: it's called Google Play Music for Chrome and it lets you "control music playback with a new mini player, add your existing music collection, and download free and purchased songs without installing Music Manager."

The Labs feature only works in Chrome and it uses Native Client to bring many of the features of the Music Manager app to the browser (great news for Chrome OS users). It also lets you install a Play Music app that shows a mini player that lets you control your music.

The mini player doesn't work if you close the Play Music tab, so you still have to keep it open.

You can also upload your music directly from Chrome. You can pick your folders or use the iTunes library. By default, Google will continue to monitor your folders and upload new music.

This is the "media file permissions" dialog:

I've picked my Music folder.

You can continue to use Play Music while the files are uploaded. You can check the progress at the bottom of the window, in the left sidebar.

If you don't have a lot of files to upload, you can use drag and drop. Just drag the files the Play Music tab.

When you downloaded multiple files, for example when downloading an album, Google used to create a ZIP archive. Now you can set a download folder and all the files are automatically downloaded to that folder.

{ via Google Play }

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