Google Music Syncs iTunes

My music library is organized with iTunes. And it has nothing to do with iPhones. The roots of this reach deep to the early 2000's - exactly to the year when the first iPod was released. This was when I started digitizing my library, which involved setting up variety of playlists. The playlists are a significant investment of time and effort over many years and since the very beginning I was struggling to make the portable to several non-Apple environments.

The first was the Squeezebox, powered by the Slimserver software running on a Slug. Hey those were the days! My entire multiroom audio is still organized with the Slimserver at the center and a number of Squeezeboxes around it. The magic of the fluorescent displays is one of the kind. Slimserver has been designed with iTunes compatibility built in, but it was not always a smooth integration although recently it's been working flawlessly.

The second non-Apple environment has been Android. And here the experience was even less rosy... For years I was using the iSyncr software that managed to synchronize the iTunes library, although it was unbearably slow, taking around two hours in my case (over a USB cable). Until Android N when it still was claiming to work while it did not.

Looking for an alternative I found... Google Play Music. As all Google software it relies on the cloud service, but to my surprise allows to sync up to 50 thousand songs up to the cloud, which it did in my case fairly flawlessly. It took a couple of days until the whole library was in the cloud, but hey, it is a one time process, so, who cares. It synced all the iTunes playlists without a glitch.

Pulling the library back to the phone was more tedious. It actually required me to go and mark each single album for download and the more I had downloaded, the slower the application was. But finally, finally it managed to pull down almost 100GB worth of music back to my phone, all with proper metadata, which included the playlists. It seems like it is a very good solution for Android users who have their music organized in iTunes. The initial sync effort is significant, but after that it just keeps working and adding an album at a time does not seem to be any tedious at all.

At some point it'd be great if Google allowed a single click to "cache all music". Hope they do this before I decide to buy a new phone and will have to go through each individual album again.