Google Play Music

Music is the official Google music app for Android [only USA so far]

USA users already know this Beta services of Google since there's the only country where it's available so far. Google Music Beta is an online music streaming service that allows you to sync your music to the cloud and play it on your desktop computer or on any other Android device. Actually you can add songs from your computer or from your mobile device (or both) to the cloud. Although there are a great amount of albums by default, Google Music is not yet a Digital Rights Management online music service (like Spotify). That means, you will be able to listen to the songs you upload to the cloud and the default music that Google has left open for everyone.

Music for Android is set in a simple and easy-to-use layout. Maybe for that reasons it runs smoothly. There are 5 tabs on the top: Artists, Albums, Songs, Playlists, Genres. From the app you can manage almost everything that you can do in the web version: search/play a song/album/artist, add/delete a new playlist, shop for artist, check other albums of that artist, play shuffle, sort by and organize to your whim.

From preferences, you can set basic playing option as "only download music to play offline over WiFi", or "Store music in cache" when streaming. You can also select those albums that you want to play offline in order to save data connection when you aren't over WiFi.

The sound quality overtakes other online music streaming services. However, the app is way too simple, and it could be improved in this point. However, if this improvement implies make it running slower, we prefer it simple and fast. The sync is fast as well as the navigation through menus. We don't understand though why it changes its background color sometimes, and we didn't find how to set it.

Music is one of the apps developed by Google Inc., the official Android Market provider, and the responsible of other indispensable Android apps as Google Books, Google Earth, Gmail or Blogger.

It needs to improve in some points, but it's already one of the best online streaming music service, specially regarding sound quality, fast sync and music management.