14 DAY TRIAL // iPhone, iPod touch owners, rejoice! Google has launched an HTML5 web-based Music Beta app for your device. Though not a native iOS app, Music Beta behaves beautifully but doesn’t stand a good chance at stealing away many potential subscribers to Apple’s iCloud.
Announced via Twitter, Music Beta is a new mobile web app that lets you listen to your entire music library on the go.
Just like iTunes in the Cloud, you get to keep all your devices in sync and you have your favorite music with you everywhere.
Upon accessing music.google.com, you will be asked to allot 25 megs of storage space for whatever the app needs to do to work on your iPhone, after which you are presented with a list of all the artists and their respective songs that you uploaded to the service.
Hit play and your music starts to stream. That’s it! One downside though - the Music Beta is limited to the United States for now.
However, unlike Google’s service, iTunes in the Cloud (also in beta) will pose a couple of advantages.
One is the ability to upload a huge library of songs much faster thanks to a feature called iTunes Match, which analyzes your music files and downloads only what Apple’s servers is missing in terms of that respective artist.
iTunes Match itself serves up a higher quality, 256-Kbps iTunes Plus version of your songs when you want to enjoy your music, that being the second benefit to using iCloud.
With Google’s service, there’s another downside - having to manually upload music every time you get new content.
By contrast, iCloud automatically downloads any new music purchase to all your devices over Wi-Fi or 3G (whichever you choose) so you can buy a song from iTunes on your Mac or iPad at home, and find it waiting for you on your iPod touch or iPhone as you are riding the bus to work.