...using the gMusic app on iOS may want to grab their device (whether it be an iPhone, iPod touch or iPad) and fire up the App Store — an update h... Read More

Once the Google Music store in the Android Market went live, I made my first Android Market music purchase. Not from an Android device and not from a Chrome browser but from Safari running on my iPhone. Then I decided to use all the Apple products I love but to replace iTunes Match and iTunes Music Store with Google Music. Here’s how it went. One great thing about Google’s cloud strategy is that it is primarily browser-based. While this has many shortcomings when it comes to offline access, bandwidth and overall performance, it means I can access the Android Market for Music directly from Safari running on my iOS devices. Unfortunately, I get sent to the full desktop site, which is less than ideal but still usable. Luckily the Android Market is set up to use Google Payments (makes sense), which I have had set up for some time now. While I Read More

It’s been a huge week for digital music lockers. First Apple made iTunes Match available to U.S. customers, then Google Music launched. These two services are competing with with Amazon’s Cloud Player (which is integrated with the new Kindle Fire) in a new realm of cloud music storage. The three major contenders offer similar products with a similar mission: Allow users to buy new music and access existing libraries from multiple devices, via the cloud. Here’s how the services compare to one another in terms of ease of use, pricing, mobile accessibility, and track selection. A disclaimer: I am a Mac owner. As a result, my desktop experiences are based around Mac OS X Lion. Windows integration may differ. For this test I used the new HTC Rezound, the iPhone 4S and iPad 2 and the Amazon Kindle Fire. Google Music is free to all users. This includes access on the Read More

James Clancey of Interactive Innovative Solutions has written two applications that let you stream your music to your handset. One app, gMusic, connects to Google's Music Beta service and another, aMusic, connects to Amazon's Cloud Music service. The future of these two apps may be in limbo. aMusic has been pulled from the Appe Store and Clancey has released the following statement to Evolver.fm: There are some legal issues with the music industry. The aMusic [app] is down temporarily. It will be back. Unfortunately I do not have a specific date when it will be back. Also, Apple has been delaying my gMusic update. I submitted it 2 weeks ago. Every other update I have submitted within the 2 weeks has been approved in under 8 hours. So not sure what the deal is. These legal issues are likely a result of Amazon's tenuous relationship with the music industry. Amazon launched Read More

gMusic is a new native app that lets you login using your Google account and listen to your Google Music library from your iPhone. Once you’ve logged in you are presented with the main app screen which contains 5 tabs on the bottom: Playlists, Artists, Songs, Albums, and Genres. In my case it took a few minutes before the playlists were populated into the gMusic app, but they did load. Browsing is pretty fast and responsive and you can search for anything by keyword. When navigating long lists you can drag on an alphabetical line (like in the native iPhone Contacts app) for quick navigation. Artist pages are shown with all their albums and available cover art, which you can dig further into. There is also an “All Songs” section for each artist which is useful. Once you start playing music, a “Now Playing” button appears on top of the app Read More

The Trendsetter Tech Series is supported by smart. Test drive the space saving, eco-friendly, totally unique, smart. Visit smartusa.com to find a new smart center near you. smart — unbig. uncar. The digital music revolution might have started in the late 1990s, but in the last few years, the way that we find, share and organize music has undergone drastic changes. Users are no longer reliant on file-sharing services to distribute tracks from person to person or device to device. Instead, thanks to subscription streaming and cloud solutions, accessing music from your laptop or home stereo is just as easy as pulling up a playlist on your phone. Still, it can be difficult to differentiate one service or app from the next. We’ve scoured the web for eleven different apps and services that improve the experience of listening to music — as well as sharing, discovering and organizing tracks. Music streaming Read More

Remember Google Music? Back in May, Google unveiled a beta version of its cloud-based music service that allows users to upload up to 20,000 songs to its servers. Users can then access that music from almost any device with a web connection. A major downside to the service is that it hasn’t had a native iOS app. It’s had a web app of sorts, but never an actual application. Until now. Macgasm is reporting that gMusic, a native Google Music app, has just surfaced in the App Store… gMusic looks very similar to the Music application in iOS, and has a lot of the same features. You can sort your music by playlists, songs, artists, albums, and even genres. Here’s an excerpt from gMusic’s App Store description: “gMusic is the only native iOS app that lets you access your Google Music account, which allows you to keep up to 20,000 of Read More