How to download Google Play Music to your computer: some practical tips. How to download music from Google Play Music Download google play music app

Important: read carefully, do not skip anything, otherwise you will hardly be able to download music from Google. There are several key points to consider here. I explain briefly and clearly, so as not to waste your precious time.

- the topic of today's article on the personal site of DJ and musician Nick de Golden. Imagine that you have bought a track for yourself and you can listen to it on the site. And if you want to listen to it on a computer, on a player, or, say, present it in a club or cafe? In any case, the ability to download is never superfluous. And most importantly - everything is legal and without consequences!

The first step is to open google browser Chrome if you're on another. Why? In the future, when downloading a purchased track, you will need to install an application from Google itself, which may only be installed in Chrome. And now, in order.

1. Look for the track you want and buy it accordingly. In my case it will be one of the old 2007 tracks "Matt Abbott - Illusions". From the remixes, I choose "Amphiby's Crossover Remix". This wonderful remix in the style of Deep Trance just drove me crazy ... But this is a matter of taste, as they say :) After Google will offer you to install an application, thanks to which you can download. It will not interfere with you, you do not need to worry.

2. After the track is purchased, go to the "My Music" section, located in the upper left column. It should also be noted that if the page header is orange, it is not recommended to use the search located in it, since here it finds only those tracks that you have already bought. To return to the current search for all tracks, click on the three-line icon at the top left and click on " Google play».

3. After you have gone to the "My Music" section, click on the cover of the track you purchased, and there hover over the name of the track - you will see the ellipsis indicated by the red arrow in the picture below.

4. Click on the three dots and click "Download".

5. Enjoy listening! :)

It is also worth considering that on this service you can find a lot, including electronic music in the styles of Trance, House, Techno, Drum & Bass, Chillout and more. Domestic music in Russian is no exception. There is even a lot of music from the 90s, so ... don't get bored. You can also download your purchased tracks as much as you want and whenever you want. For example, if a track is lost from the computer, then you are given such an opportunity, which is very convenient.

Google Play Music is a great music storage service with up to 50,000 custom tracks. Its only drawback is that it plays songs exclusively through a web browser. Google Play Music Desktop Player is designed to solve this problem. The application allows you to play tracks without the participation of a browser, quickly find the necessary works by various criteria, and even scrobble Last.fm.

Opportunities:

playing all songs added to the Play Music service;
support for playlists;
function of automatic selection of tracks;
scrobbling Last.fm;
track change notifications.

Principle of operation:

immediately after starting, the utility will offer to connect your account in the Google Media Library. After authorization, all purchased tracks, as well as downloaded music files, will become available. To add your own songs to the collection, use the Download Manager program.

The player interface is similar to the web version of the service. Thanks to Russian localization, it is very easy to understand the possibilities. Let's pay attention to the interesting function of automatic selection of tracks based on the song being played. To create an automatic playlist while playing a song, click on the icon in the form of three vertical dots and select the "Enable Automix" item.

Pros:

special mini-player function;
control by means of "hot keys";
support for HTML5 Audio standard;
interface in Russian;
there are versions for Linux and MacOS.

Minuses:

the player is not suitable for playing local tracks;
no equalizer.

Google Play Music Desktop Player or GPMDP for short is a great tool for playing your Google Play Music collection without a browser. The program has enough functions for comfortable listening to tracks.

Analogues:

Tomahawk is a powerful audio player that allows you to listen to the latest in the music industry;
AIMP is a functional player with a "light" interface.

To store your music library and gain access to new recordings. This music service has practically no weaknesses, except for one nuisance - it only works in the browser. Therefore, if you want to listen to music, you have to keep open chrome or Firefox, even if you don't need them now. To solve this problem, as well as get a number of additional bonuses, you can use the Google Play Music Desktop Player application.

As the name suggests, Google Play Music Desktop Player is a desktop player that lets you access your music service. Google... This is an open source program source code for Windows, Mac and Linux by independent developers. You can download it at this address.

First of all, after starting the program, you will need to enter the data of your account Google. The player will then gain access to the music library and you can start playing. By default, Google Play Music Desktop Player has a light design with orange elements, however you can enable dark theme combined with another color scheme in the application settings.

In addition to various design options, you will find several other useful functions in the Google Play Music Desktop Player. Here is a list of them:

support for media keys (play, pause, stop, previous track, next track);
scrobbling information about listened songs in Last.fm;
track change notifications;
beautiful mini-player that can be displayed on top of all windows;
the ability to control playback using a button on the Windows taskbar;
HTML5 Audio support;
built-in equalizer;
customizable hotkeys.

As you can see, some of the features of Google Play Music Desktop Player look very tempting. But the most important advantage of this program is, undoubtedly, the ability to save computer resources due to the fact that you will not need to keep a regular browser constantly open.

In this article, I want to tell you how I switched to using a music service from Google instead of listening to a collection of music on a computer using my favorite player. But first, a little digression. I listen to music all the time, at home, at work (I work mostly at home), on the way to a meeting or somewhere else, on flights, and so on. Everywhere. At the same time, at home, all the music is stored, of course, on a computer, collected for years, lovingly sorted into daddies, registered the correct tags, searched for album covers, in a word, everything is as it should be. With a player for Windows, on which you could listen to all this, there have been several changes over the past 5-6 years. In the beginning I used WinAmp, like most people in Russia with computers. Probably. Then I switched to Foobar, and not because of the sound quality, like many others, but simply because at that time it was this player that made it possible to get a convenient tree structure of all music with folders, plus, there were many possibilities for changes appearance player. At one time, I even had iTunes as the main player, but since there is no worse player in the world (especially for those who store music in folders and are used to choosing music in folders, and not by searching or through categories), I quickly "jumped off" ... In the end, I settled on a strange, but, as it turned out, convenient for me personally, the JRiver Media Center player, in which you can set up auto-play along with the launch of the player, work with folders, enable search and download of missing album covers from the network. I wrote all this so that you can understand - I really listen to music a lot and until recently could not imagine that I would suddenly abandon my collection and my convenient player on my computer in favor of Google Play Music. But that is what happened.

We have already written about the official launch of the music service from Google in Russia and some of its features. In this article, I will talk about all the features of Google Play Music, the pros and cons, and why I now use this online service.

Subscription

The most important thing about Google Play Music and the main reason why the service is so convenient and useful is that it has a subscription. If you do not activate the monthly subscription, then the cost of a track is about 15 rubles, and an album - 150-200 rubles. The prices are, perhaps, normal, but not very familiar to us. I want to say that it is one thing to buy physical media for that amount and another to buy several megabytes of music. In Russia, they are not yet accustomed to this. And that's where subscription comes in.

If you subscribe before mid-November, you will need to pay 169 rubles a month, if after mid-November - 189 rubles. What do you get for a monthly fee of 170 or 190 rubles?

The ability to listen online to all the tracks presented in Google Play Music (over 18 million tracks)
The ability to download an unlimited number of tracks to a computer or any smartphone and listen to them offline, without an Internet connection
The ability to listen to radio stations based on your preferences for music genres, albums, and more
The ability to upload to the cloud, then listen online from a smartphone, tablet, computer or laptop anywhere with the Internet, up to 20,000 tracks

The last point is also subject to the use of the service without a subscription. But the whole point is that if you need to buy tracks without a subscription, then by subscribing and paying a monthly fee once a month, you get all these tracks for the entire subscription period for free. And you can download them to any smartphone in any quantity, it's true.

Interface and features

In my opinion, the main drawback of the service now is the lack of a client for Windows, Mac, Linux. That is, you need to listen to music in a browser window and, accordingly, a number of secondary disadvantages are associated with this: you cannot control playback from the keyboard, as in any local player, there are no sound settings, there are no interface presentation settings, and much more. However, the browser version of the service is already quite suitable for permanent use.

In the service window on the left there is a small menu with several important sections, this is the "Main" page, where the last listened tracks are displayed, and there is a button "You will like it", by clicking it, you will turn on the playback of the tracks selected by the service, taking into account your preferences. There is "My Music Library", which stores the tracks you downloaded to the cloud and to devices. There is “Obzor”, a kind of library, here you can search for any tracks in different genres and subgenres.

The "Radio" section allows you to listen to music similar to a specific artist or genre. Here, the system collects the selections recommended to you based on the information collected by the service about what you are listening to. Accordingly, the more time you use Google Play Music, the more accurate this system will work and the more suitable tracks it will collect into collections. I will say to myself, I have already found several interesting selections here, and if you are listening to a selection and you don’t like some track in it, you can give it 1 (on a five-point scale), the track will be excluded from the selection, and this rating will be counted system when compiling future selections.

The playlist screen of a specific artist also contains recommendations for artists playing in a similar style, as well as albums and compilations of the artist, of course.

You can view a list of tracks in an album or collection, or turn on full-screen cover art. True, the quality of the covers in Google Play Music is not very good yet, and on the monitor with high resolution it doesn't look very good.

In the settings, you can go to the "Laboratory" and install a couple of add-ons there. It is hoped that in the future for the service, as well as for Gmail, for example, there will appear big number quality additions. So far I have found only one useful thing there - notifications about playing tracks in the system tray (for Windows).

For Windows systems there is a special client with which you can upload tracks from your computer to the cloud. It works very simply - you specify the player from the base of which you want to download tracks or specific folders on your computer, then the process of uploading them to the server begins.

Google Play Music on smartphone

App for smartphones on Android base in its capabilities it resembles a service in a browser window. The main disadvantage here is exactly the same as on a PC - you can listen to music, even downloaded to the device, only with the help of this program, you will not see these tracks in any other player. Another drawback so far is the impossibility of choosing a location for downloading tracks, that is, all this is loaded into a pre-defined folder in internal memory devices. For smartphones with a small amount of internal memory and flash cards, this disadvantage is especially critical.

Conclusion

In my opinion, with the arrival of Google Play Music in Russia, two services will have a very difficult time at some point - firstly, this is Yandex.Music, and secondly, free music in social network"In contact with". Yandex.Music and Google Play Music are similar in many ways - both subscription services allow you to listen to a huge amount of music online. And yet, Yandex's music base is more modest, for some it doesn't matter, but I, for example, immediately ran into this minus. If in Google Play Music I find all the albums of my favorite band “Anathema”, then in Yandex.Music there are only two albums. In terms of capabilities, Yandex's service is also weaker so far - there is no such system of recommendations and "radio", it all looks simpler and not so beautiful and clear. As for free tracks on the Vkontakte network, it is obvious that sooner or later the shop will be closed, and then millions of users who are accustomed to listening to music online will have to look for new sources. Someone will find free analogs, and someone decides to pay 100-200 rubles per month for a quality service from Google, Yandex or someone else.

And most importantly, it seems to me that Google Play Music has already become a full-fledged replacement for the music collection on a computer for everyone who loves to listen to music and listens to it constantly, but at the same time is not too picky about the quality of tracks, does not collect everything in lossless formats and does not has super-acoustics, amplifier and other things for "real clear sound". That is why Google Play Music has already become such a replacement for music on a computer's hard drive for me.

Artem Lutfullin ()

Now officially available in Russia. Naturally, we could not miss such an important event, and therefore have prepared for you instructions on how to connect to Google Play Music from scratch to listening to songs. Go.

Connection

So, if you go to Google Play now, you will find in the left corner a new tab called "Music".

When you go to this section, Google will warmly welcome you to its new service and offer to accept the terms of use. We agree.

Tariff selection

Now you need to select the type of subscription. We have access to a standard account (free), as well as "full access" (trial + subscriber after a month of free testing).

Free tariff includes the ability to upload 20 thousand tracks from your own music collection to the music cloud, buy music on Google Play and sync it all with mobile device Android.

Paid tariff includes all the features of the free + access to the entire Play Music library (over 18 million tracks), a user-configurable radio with the ability to switch tracks and themed playlists compiled by live music experts. All this pleasure can be tested for free for 30 days, after which you will have to pay 189 rubles per month (169 rubles if you subscribe before November 15).

We decided to test everything in stages, so initially we abandoned the full access trial (it can still be connected later). In the end, not everyone wants to pay for this service, and first of all we are interested in what Play Music can do without financial investments in it.

Google Wallet

So, the default account is selected, and now Google offers to set it up.

The essence of the setting is to link a Google Wallet to your account. If you don't have a wallet yet, you'll have to create one now. Don't worry. Despite the loud name "Google Wallet", the essence of the process comes down to a simple indication of your address and postal data and linking a bank card. In the future, access to your Google Wallet can be obtained at https://wallet.google.com/.

Attention! When registering a wallet, a trial 30 rubles will be debited from the bank card, which after a short period of time will be safely returned to the same card. Don't panic.

Download music

We are done with registration in the service. It's time to upload music to the cloud. For these purposes, Google offers to install the "Download Manager" - a small desktop client that will pick up the existing user music library from iTunes, Windows Media or the local folder of the computer, after which it will flood all this to itself.

In the process of uploading, Play Music analyzes the tracks, and if its own music library already contains a track downloaded by the user, it will simply instantly be uploaded to the user library from the Play Music server, but with a beautiful picture.

Now we indicate the place from where the manager needs to pull the tracks. In our case, this is a local folder.

In the future, the download manager will sit in the tray, and the user at any time will be able to upload new tracks to the cloud himself, or set automatic uploads from certain computer folders through the manager's settings.

After the process of loading the music library into Play Music has begun, you can immediately go to the service's web interface and start exploring it.

Web interface

In fact, everything is very standard here and is mastered in just a couple of minutes. We have home page, where a random tiled vinaigrette from the music we have already downloaded is located.

When you go to the "Music Library" section, our music collection opens. The presentation of the collection is expectedly realized through a list of artists, albums, a general list of tracks and genres.

At the bottom of the interface is the player panel. It works independently of the content of the page and allows you to freely navigate the web service while maintaining the playback of the current song.

Automixes are the automated creation of a thematic playlist based on a specific composition. There is also an option for a full random "I’m feeling lucky", in which the service itself instantly makes a list based on random parameters.

Google Play - go to the music store. Everything is clear here.

From other points, it is worth highlighting "From friends". Google decided to socialize their music machine as much as possible and made it possible for friends to fumble the music downloaded from Play.

That's all. Other functions of the service, such as compiling playlists and play queues, are probably familiar to absolutely everyone and do not need detailed description... Combined with an intuitive interface, the explanation of these functions becomes even more irrelevant. The same can be said about the Play Music settings - there are quite a few of them and they are quite obvious.