android populer

Google found a great way to use the data from the people who uploaded songs to Google Play Music. Google Music Timeline "shows genres of music waxing and waning, based on how many Google Play Music users have an artist or album in their music library, and other data (such as album release dates). Each stripe on the graph represents a genre; the thickness of the stripe tells you roughly the popularity of music released in a given year in that genre."



The timeline starts in 1950, data is is normalized by the total number of albums from a certain year and there's no classical music.

Mouse over a genre to find popular albums, search for an album or artist.

{ via John Mueller }

To upload audio files to Google Play Music, you need to use Music Manager. It's only available as a native app for Windows, Mac OS X and Linux, so you can't use it if you have a Chromebook or a mobile device.

What if you need to upload a few songs and you don't want to wait until Music Manager syncs your files? What if you're using someone else's computer and you can't install Music Manager?

Google Play Music's source code includes a message which suggests that you'll be able to upload songs from your browser: "Drag songs or folders here to add music to your library. Or, if you prefer, select from your computer."


{ Thanks, Florian K. }

Google's Sound Search widget for Android has a history page which shows all the songs that have been recognized by the application. You can also find this list inside Google Play Music if you go to this playlist. This is especially useful if you subscribe to the All Access feature and you can play all the songs.



A Google screenshot shows the Sound Search playlist in the sidebar:


"Hear a song you like while you're out and about? Touch the microphone on the home screen of your Android phone or tablet. Google Play identifies the song and adds it to the Song Match playlist. You can also use the Sound Search for Google Play app," mentions the page.

The first feature doesn't work for me, but maybe it will be added in the future.

{ Thanks, Florian K. }

Google Play Music has a new feature called "I'm Feeling Lucky" that creates a radio based on your listening history. If you subscribe to All Access, Google includes a lot of songs that aren't in your library, otherwise the feature is a fancy name for "shuffle".

Here are some screenshots from the Android app:


There's a "dice" animation while the playlist is generated:


You can reorder the songs, remove some of them or add all the songs to a playlist by tapping "save queue".


You can find a similar feature in the desktop interface: go to "Listen Now" and click "I'm Feeling Lucky Radio".


You get a different "Feeling Lucky" playlist every time you roll the dice and the songs from the playlist are usually related. Here's an example of Eurovision-related playlist:


Click "Refresh station" and you'll get a completely new playlist:


For the old-fashioned shuffle feature restricted to your library, go to "My Library" and click "Shuffle My Library". In the Android app, go to the "Songs" tab from the "My Library" section and tap "shuffle all".

{ Thanks, Zachary. }

Google's online music service started to suggest better tag values for the songs you've uploaded. If you right-click a song or an album and select "edit info", you might see some suggested values for the album's name, the track number, genre or even the artwork. Click the suggested value to use it or click "use suggestions" to add all the suggested values, then click "save".

There's no magic "fix all my tags" button, so you need to manually fix the tags for each song or album. Google's suggestions aren't always great, so maybe it's better this way.



{ Merci, Alexandre Olliet. }

That's a long name. It's actually a music subscription service available in the US that's part of Google Play Music.

"Google Play Music All Access is a new monthly music subscription service that lets you listen to millions of songs across your devices. You can create a radio station from any song or artist you love, browse recommendations from our expert music team or explore by genre. (...) It's $9.99 a month, and you can try it free for the first month. Or better yet, start your trial by June 30 and you'll pay only $7.99 a month."


Instead of buying music, you can listen to the entire Google Play catalog. It's not free like Pandora, but you can listen to any song you like, as long as it's available.