Tuesday, May 5, 2015

Google Play Music using openSUSE

Feliz Cinco de mayo ! I thought today would be a great day to just chill out, knock back a few rum and cokes or las cuba libres and figure out a decent way to share my music collection over multiple devices.

My first instinct was to set everything up on amazon music ! Boo hiss Amazon. Although you can listen to Amazon music just fine on any device for some reason they just don't like working with linux. Amazon music only allows uploads with Windows and Mac. Ironically, I called Amazon tech support one day about something else and the tech guy said it's funny because all the customer service people use linux systems. I think I remember him saying they use Ubuntu. Oh well, I find myself using Amazon less and less these days ! AMAZON Y U NO ACCEPT BITCOIN OR HAVE LINUX SUPPORT ?

O.k., I digress, after a little thought I figured I would try Google Play Music. Wow, what a pleasant surprise. Not only do they offer Linux support for some distributions, they honestly make it as easy as using a Windows computer. This was really refreshing and the first time I've experienced this. I hope this is a sign of things to come in the future. Kudos Google.

So the first thing you have to do is download the Google Play Music Manager. You can find it here.

https://support.google.com/googleplay/answer/1229970

I clicked the "Download Music Manager" button and after a couple seconds it automatically detected I had a linux system and gave me a few different distro choices. I selected the Fedora/openSUSE 64 bit link and it downloaded the file and opened and installed automatically with apper. Holy crap on a cracker in my two years of using Fedora and now openSUSE, this has never happened. The install couldn't of been any easier ! I haven't had an install this easy since the days of using Windows.

After the install I had a hard time finding the program, but after going through application launcher I found it under "applications". I clicked the program, it asked for my Google user name and password, asked which folder contained my music, and then automatically uploaded over 600 songs in under an hour. I can't tell you how impressed I am with this whole thing. Much props to Google !

There were a few other configuration choices like whether you want it to automatically upload new music, or if you will upload manually. If you decide to use Play Music, I'll leave the configuration up to you. It's really easy to use.

Now, I need to get back to some rum and cokes, download the rest of my music from Amazon, and get it uploaded to Google Play. I can now stream music from my Android tablet, phone, and openSUSE laptop ! Rock on dood !





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