14 DAY TRIAL // Google has finally made it possible to get your music back from the black hole that used to be Google Music. Previously, any music you uploaded to the service was stuck there, there was no way of downloading any of it back.
The limitation was placed under pressure from music labels, under a misguided effort to curve piracy.
"Now we’re making sure the process is just as smooth for you to retrieve your music from the cloud. We just rolled out a new version of Music Manager that gives you the option to download all your songs from Google Music, including songs you’ve uploaded yourself and those you’ve purchased in the Google Music store," Google explained in a Google+ post.
"Your music will still be accessible from the cloud, so you will continue to have all the benefits of cloud access. Now if your computer crashes, you’ll have a great backup for your music," it said.
The latest version of the Music Manager app adds support for music downloads. So far, it only enabled users to upload their music library to the cloud. The ability to download your music back seems like an obvious one, but music labels are rarely governed by common sense.
You can also download your music, one track at a time, from the web version of the Google Music player. However, you can only download any given song a total of two times from the web interface, yet another artificial limitation imposed by the labels.
Users were already able to download the songs they bought from the Google Music store, but everything else was off limits.
The Amazon Cloud Player also supports music downloads. You can download any number of files at a time, but you need to use the Amazon MP3 downloader in order to do so.