Google Music All Access Revisited

I've had a little more time to spend with Google Music All Access.  I have even branched out and tried a couple of things to make the experience better.

The first thing I did was pick up this sweet "app" from vhanla.  While it basically just does what a browser does it seems to suffer less from the memory explosion of Chrome, not to mention it has options on when to dump memory, too.  There are actually a lot of neat features.  The latest version seems to add support for this latest feature that came out of I/O.  This has been around for a while and people seem to enjoy it.  I'm a bit of a minimalist, so it is nice to see that even though it is something else I've got to have running that I can smash it into a tiny attractive frame and put it somewhere that isn't going to bother me.  Kudos to my buddy Billy for keeping an eye out for something to unfuckify my life.

The second thing was try out an iOS app that supports this feature.  When I described the absolute disaster of using the Android version, I could have never imagined that an experience could exist that was even more poor.  This is that experience.  Don't get me wrong, the app isn't really all that bad, it just isn't good... at all.  The app does support Google Music All Access. It does work for the most part.  It does pretty much everything that it needs to.  The design is cluttered and kind of ugly.  The navigation is a little weird.  I don't hate it, but I'd have a hard time recommending it.  I blame Google, though.  If they would just release an app we wouldn't have to deal with these knock-offs.  The Wal-Mart version of an official Google app never offers quite the experience you hope for.  Trust me... I've got a Windows Phone.

The final thing is really put the thing through the paces.  The servers are kind of slow.  Maybe they are ramping it up, I don't know.  I am getting more and more frustrated by the stutter that is caused when loading anything that might require an ounce of processing power.  While I notice this much less using vhanla's alternative, it is still there.  It makes me want to rip my hair out.  There have been times when I have to actually STOP doing what I am doing so that I can open Spotify and load up THE SAME FUCKING SONGS.  ERGH!

I still have the ultimate faith in this product, but I am not impressed with it thus far.  I am hoping that by the holiday season I will be smitten and completely absorbed into the Android camp again.