Playing with Google Play Music

THE PROBLEM

Apple used to have the best technology in this area.  The iTunes application was initially very simple and elegant, and it was easy to manage and synchronize your music on both desktops and devices.  But it seems quite often, they need to radically change the user interface, forcing you to relearn the user interface.  Apple's iCloud services for synchronizing music has been abysmal.  The music you buy from the iTunes store, can only be used on iTunes, which is fine if all you use is Mac OS X and Apple's gadgets, but not cool if you use non-Apple products.  The Windows version of iTunes hasn't gotten a lot of love, and consequently, doesn't have a very rich user experience there.  The workaround is to buy a Mac.

THE SOLUTION

Thus I am open to looking for something new, some alternatives.  Enter Google Play Music.  You manage your music through web applications or mobile device applications (which are ultimately web applications with a different wrapper).

THE EXPERIENCE

The experience on Mac OS X was a little rough.  To get access to the application, you have to use Google Chrome, and then install Play Music from Google's web store.  After this is installed, you can try to upload music, accessed through menu icon in the upper left.  Going through the process, you'll be prompted to Add a credit card to verify your country of residence:

In my experience, I had an error, which baffled Google's technical support.  There was no insight from the error, which simply said: "Sorry, we were unable to process this request.  Please try again later".  In the main page, it just says "Server error.  Try again later".  This is not a lot of useful information that could be used to troubleshoot the issue.

I eventually found the error on my own, I had a default invalid credit card on my account, and even through the user interface showed a valid credit card, it bombed out.  I'm guessing it was using invalid data for valid data.  I had to navigate to the main Google Play application, and adjust my account  information, then I could go forward in Play Music and upload my music.