![]() It has a good community of usersĪs well as supporting additional music storage services, Astiga has an option to help you upload your music into the cloud, using the pCloud service. It’s based on the Web, so you can access it anywhere, but works just great on any platform with a web browser, like your smartphone. ![]() Make sure to stay up to date with how we build on this service!Īstiga is an app written by an indie developer. In the interests of transparency, I'll leave the below overview untouched. Still, Google's first foray into the streaming music category in Apple's App Store is a solid first outing and I'm sure we'll see more improvements down the road.Disclaimer alert! We have since acquired Astiga. It's also not yet on par with the Android version, with some features, such as the "I'm feeling lucky" option for creating radio stations, not yet available on the iPhone. The app also doesn't have an option to show lyrics, and you won't be able to read band bios, features found in many of the apps from this genre. One is that it doesn't work on the iPad, but the company says an iPad version is currently in the works. There are only a few drawbacks at this point with Google Play Music when compared with other similar services. Even the free version is worthwhile because you can upload 20,000 songs to Google's servers and use the app as your main music player without paying a dime. But with that said, Google Play Music has an excellent interface that's easy to use, an enormous library of music, great music discovery features, it streams music at up to 320 kbps, and works well on all your devices. For a similar experience you could download apps like Rdio or Slacker Radio, and several other lesser known apps that do about the same thing. Google Play Music is certainly not the first app of its kind, and is actually entering a fairly crowded genre of apps in the App Store with this latest release. It's a great layout for discovering new music, and Google will also use an algorithm to suggest songs you might like based on your listening habits. The app shows featured playlists at the top, followed by top albums, and then has top songs at the bottom. Here you can browse Google's entire catalog by genre, listen to playlists made by Google's staff, and browse through the new releases and chart toppers. With All Access, you'll also be able to take advantage of the Explore tab found in the app's slide out menu in the top left. Just like the free version, you'll be streaming from the server to your iPhone by default, but can also download your favorites so you can listen without an Internet connection. You also be able to listen to customized ad-free radio stations by selecting a song, album, or artist, and there are no skip limits (a common limitation in other apps). For $9.95 per month, you'll then have access to Google's library of more than 20 million songs, which lets you search by song, album, or artist to find music you like for listening directly or making playlists. To really take advantage of the service, you can sign up for Google All Access on your desktop computer. The Google Play Music app also works seamlessly with Chromecast, so you can send music to your entertainment system just like you can with other streaming music apps, such as Pandora and the Google Play Music app for Android. Fortunately, you can download some of your favorites for when you want to listen and don't have an Internet connection. But, as a streaming service, you also won't be able to listen to your full library of music when offline. Once finished, all of your music is stored online, so you don't have to worry about storage space on your iPhone, and you can listen from any device seamlessly. The download manager offers a number of options for uploading, including straight from your iTunes library. Using Google's download manager for the desktop, you can upload up to 20,000 songs of your current music library to Google's cloud servers so you can play them on your iPhone or through a Web browser. The Google Play Music app on its own is free and has a few useful features without signing up for a subscription, but you will still need a standard account with Google (such as Gmail) to get started. The interface is very intuitive, and it's laid out in such a way that just about anyone could pick up the app and immediately understand how to use it. ![]()
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