Johnny Ray

Anyone who knows me knows I’m an avid music collector. I enjoy a variety of genres and sounds. Like most people, I was pretty excited when Google finally announced their Music Beta product. It was something I had been waiting for, for quite a while. Don’t get me wrong, it’s not as if Google was filling some sort of void. After all, Amazon had already beat them to market with their Cloud Player solution. Amazon’s solution, coupled with their existing MP3 store makes for a seamless music management experience. Thing is, I already consume other Google Cloud services (Gmail, Docs etc) so, to finally have a solution that will almost certainly integrate with those services in the future was welcomed news.

The first thing I thought was interesting is that Google doesn’t seem to enforce a storage limit in terms of raw storage space. Instead, they have a 20,000 song limit (free while in beta) which is huge! My collection consists of roughly 3500 songs which isn’t even putting a dent in my quota. This is great seeing as though one of my biggest complaints about alternative solutions, is that in order to get that type of storage you have to spend an arm and a leg and you don’t get the integration that Google will inevitably offer. Now, Google will most likely charge for the service once it’s out of beta but if it’s competitive with similar services – I’d be willing to pay for it.

There are solutions out there that predate even Amazon. My gripe with home server based solutions is that they require you to setup your own server and rely on your home Internet connection to serve up your songs through the cloud to your client. A solution that comes to mind that many people aren’t talking about is Opera Unite. I’ve actually used Opera Unite and it works remarkably well. It’s easy to setup and easy to manage. Last time I used the service though, the playback interface was a bit lacking. Some people don’t mind relying on their home infrastructure for their content delivery and in best case scenarios that may be ok – but I’d prefer to rely on a robust infrastructure with support for redundancy, distributed storage, caching to serve up my content. In addition, if you’re away from home and your server suddenly shuts down, your power goes out, or the software simply breaks it’s likely to not be fixed until you get home to troubleshoot it yourself. If you just so happen to be out of town when this occurs, you may be screwed. That’s not to say these solutions aren’t feasible, I’ve used them myself – they’re great. I just imagine the worst case scenario. Even in the day of Google Music and Amazon I still have a backup for my music. And a backup for my backup (seriously). So, it’s not personal.

As you may or may not know, Google Music is integrated with the latest version of Android’s Music player. I have access to my entire music collection on my phone which is awesome! My Zune HD is so jealous. And yes, I have a Zune HD, say what you like about the device but the damn thing is sexy and much more suited to my taste than any variation of the iPod. I know I know, I don’t get the apps but, I don’t care. Anyway, in addition to being able to stream your entire collection natively on Android, you have the ability cache any of the albums on demand on the device itself which is great if you find yourself temporarily without an internet connection.

There are a bunch of other features as well as gotchas associated with the service as well as the app (well not really the app it’s pretty basic) but this is not a review by any stretch of the imagination. It’s also worth mentioning that Apple is expected to launch a similar cloud music solution (presumably tightly integrated with iTunes). The difference being Apple is rumored to have the “blessing” of major music labels – something at which Google has failed. I’m sure this has something to do with the wild success of iTunes – music labels figure if they’re going to jump on board with someone they’d rather it be with Apple because of the proven revenue stream associated with iTunes. Like with all other things – these companies competing in the same space will be great for the consumers and gives techies like me one more thing to argue about with fellow geeks.

Please excuse this self-indulgent blog post as I am plugging a neat JQuery plugin written by yours truly. I love music – but then again, most people do. In addition to being a music lover, my style is somewhat minimalistic. As a minimalistic, music-loving web developer I thought it would be nice to create a minimalistic music player for the web. I wanted to create something which delivered core functionality without too many bells and whistles – something that would get the job done without taking attention away from the content of the web site. One could argue that the tiny bar shaped MP3 player options out there do just this but I honestly think they’re a little boring. I needed something with a little more swag – excuse the pun. I decided to build my own solution. A couple weeks later SWAGG Player was born. It’s built on top of a really nice JavaScript API built by Scott Schiller called SoundManager2. If you’d like more information about Scott and his API you can visit the official site for SoundManager here. You can see Swagg Player in action at the homepage of my site – johnny-ray.com. Installation and configuration instructions are here. As of this writing, the current version is 0.5 with 0.6 days away. Feel free to contact me with any issues or questions. Thanks!

JQuery project site for Swagg Player