Last week, I posted about pitting spotify (premium) against the newly announced “Google All Access”, and today I am going to post an update.
To be fair, I have only been using it for 4 or so days now, but the one thing that drove me nuts about using my collection in Play was that it would skip, stutter and freeze periodically. And by periodically, I mean at least once an hour. I figured that Google would have addressed that by now, with their play to go large and challenge Spotify.
But the skips, pauses, stutters, and even long freezes (up to a minute at a time) are still plaguing the service. I have submitted feedback, but naturally no response (I expect none, as Google is notorious for their lack of direct support).
I am not sure how much this is caused by it running in a tab on my Chrome browser, versus Spotify’s dedicated application. This is all on my PC (HP Elitebook 8640p, core i5, with 16 G ram, and my work network). But Spotify either does a better job of routing packets to me, or queuing up a buffer to avoid the follies of internet packet delivery.
It is a shame, as I was grooving on the All Access radio stations. Their matching algorithms aren’t as good as Pandora, but they aren’t bad. And having my 18K files in their storage means that even the artists that don’t do streaming will be mixed in with my radio selections. (I could do that with Spotify, but I would need to dedicate 120G of disk locally for it, a big negative).
So, I am back to Spotify, and enjoying their service, and performance. I will continue to try the Google service, on my Nexus 7. Maybe with an Android native app it will be better?
