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One of the things I noticed when I got the Nexus 5 phone was that it pales as an audio player compared to the iPhone. What I didn't mention is also how much the built-in Google Play Music app was spartan. All I could do to play music was to transfer audio files by a USB cable. While it is nice that it auto-scans the storage for music file, I would have preferred a cleaner approach where I could manually add to my music collection specific audio files.

Since I recycled my iPhone 4S as my main music and podcast player, I seldom looked at the Play Music app, until in early June I casually looked at it after an app update and noticed it had quite a few more options. Basically, "Google Play Music All Access" was now available in Canada.

The first thing that jumped at me is that you can upload your music files in your Play Music library, for free. It can even automatically import your entire iTunes library. I tried it with mine, which has about 3800 songs and two dozen playlists, and it worked quite well. There was a minor issue with the file importer ignoring all music files that had accents in their file names, so I had to import those files manually, but still, compared to the non-free iTunes Match service, the experience was amazingly smooth. To compare, Play Music never, ever had any issue importing and playing back my non-matched audio files (meaning, songs not part of the Play Music store), while I constantly run into issues and general slowness with iTunes Match. Yes, the $30 / year service from iTunes is worse than the free Google service, and the Google service doesn't require you to install iTunes in the first place, for all you iTunes haters out there.

So, for the "All Access" thing, it is quite similar to Rdio. I talked about music streaming services in the past, but to give you a summary of the what happened since in Canada, not much. There's still only Rdio, Deezer, and a few small ones with even smaller libraries. So, doing the legal thing with copyright in Canada still sucks.

After using Rdio for a few years, there are still a few things that annoy me, especially given that it's quite an expensive service ($10 per month):

• By default, Rdio is still highly "social", with everything shared and public by default. And by that I mean your playback history, playlists, listening habits, what you're listening to right now, and more. They compromised by introducing a "private" mode where things are shared with your Rdio friends, but still that sucks.
• The music collection oddly seems to be shrinking over time. Sure, I noticed that a lot of albums have exact duplicates, with the only distinction being the label that published the album. This creates the weird effect that if you add to your collection one of those albums, but chance it may get delisted and you'll have to hunt the new "owner". Still, half the time stuff gets delisted and never comes back, almost as often as those "1-year contracts" you see on Netflix Canada.
• Playlist management sucks. Sure, they just added the functionality to manage playlists on iOS, but still, on all platforms you cannot manipulate more than a song at the same time. For example, breaking the album "Mozart: The Complete Operas" into manageable playlists took hours, moving songs one by one. Shift-click?
• Search, and pretty much the entire GUI on desktop or iOS, is somehow slow. Looking for "that song" doesn't work well and can be frustrating.
• If you mark songs to be synchronized to mobile devices, it will be so for all your devices. Doesn't make sense if you only carry one device with you, and on top of that the massive bandwidth usage this can generate if you have four devices downloading songs at the same time.

So, I had to try "All Access" from Google, at least to compare. Also, because the first month is free and if you sign up before June 30 (meaning, today or tomorrow), it is $8 instead of $10 per month, for life.

So, how does it stack up compared to Rdio? Let's start with the cons first, to be fair.

Cons

• The user reviews from the Play Music store don't show up in the player view. I miss the inline user reviews from Rdio.
• No global playback history. Sure, history of radios show up in the current queue, but once the queue is cleared, it is gone. Also, playback queues aren't shared across devices, unless you save them as playlists each time.
• Mobile support is limited to iOS and Android.
• The "Thumbs up" automatic playlist isn't sorted the same way across devices for some reason.

Pros

• All your music is there. Personal, bought on Play Music, or "All Access".
• Search. It's Google. Search is amazing and instant.
• The GUI is amazingly fast on all platforms.
• The album library is cleaner (no label duplicates).
• The library is somewhat bigger than Rdio. For every one "vanishing" album on Rdio, there are three or four that exist only on All Access.
• Playlist and metadata editing is great. Shift-click to select multiple songs works, and it quite powerful.
• Song caching for offline playback is done per-device, not as a global setting as on Rdio.

Overall, Google Play Music All Access, apart from its stupid name ("Rdio" has four letters) wins hands down. I think I'll transition from Rdio to All Access in the next few months. Pricing is identical, for feature-wise, All Access is much cleaner, faster and bigger that Rdio. And the (amazingly) completely free "My Library" music upload service is just icing on the cake.

As for iTunes, Apple should get their act together. iTunes Match is plain buggy and slow, searching (local or in the store) is even slower, their Podcasting support is broken beyond repair (avoid it completely), and everybody on Windows hate iTunes, for good reason. Sure, iTunes Radio, Beats, and so on, but they're all US-only, so why should I care if it's going to take until 2016 until we see anything of them in Canada? Same can be said of Spotify, Pandora, Amazon Music, and so on: Until you show up internationally outside of that Silicon Valley bubble, put up or shut up. Google Play Music All Access is there internationally now.

Published on June 28, 2014 at 20:05 EDT

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