- Go to http://www.freeproxy.net/. In case the previous link doesn't work go here and you'll find plenty of US proxies available.
- Type in music.google.com and click Visit (Click Continue Anyway if any warning appears.)
- Log in with your Google account and request an invitation.
- Very important: change your Google Account password! The proxy server you just used was unencrypted and insecure, therefore, to maximize protection over your account it's best to change your Google password.
That's it! There's nothing else you need to do but wait for your invitation. Mine came in a few hours. No VPN tunneling required, nor installing Hotspot Shield, no fiddling with Vidalia, Tor or Privoxy. You don't even need to change any browser settings. Using the link in the email you may log in to your free Music Beta account from anywhere in the world, not just the US.
Short review
After signing up you’ll be provided the Music Manager client that will upload your media library to Google’s servers. The Music Manager supports MP3, AAC (as .m4a), WMA (for the Windows version of the client) and OGG for the Linux version (?). FLACs are transcoded to 320kbps mp3s. This should be enough to make most users happy. Chances are that file support will be extended later on although there is no official word on this. The client interface and options are pretty straightforward. You can close it at any time and upload will resume on next startup. The Music Manager even offers to monitor your selected folders for changes in order to keep your online library up to date. Memory usage was surprisingly low, at a mere 25MB of RAM during upload. However, CPU usage almost always stays at 50% for both cores on the test machine which sports an AMD Athlon 64 X2 @2.4Ghz. It's by no means a powerhouse but what on Earth is Google doing with all that CPU power for a simple upload process? The music library in question does not contain any FLAC so are they doing other on-the-fly transcoding?
The most criticized aspect of Google Music is the painstakingly lengthy process of uploading one's music library to the cloud! Sure, it may take ages, or even weeks, but you only have to do it once! It's really not so bad for what benefits this provides.
Music Player
The web Music Player needs Flash to work. Other than that it provides all the basic controls you'd expect, not far off from Grooveshark’s. An obvious must have would be an equalizer. One pleasant surprise was the good support for album art. The music library used in tests contained a .jpg file with album art in every album folder. The Music Player successfully displayed the covers for each album. Users benefit from a feature called Instant Mix to create a playlist of songs that go well together. Music imported from iTunes will retain playlists as well.
Google Music does not currently support buying music, only uploading a user's own music for streaming purposes. Music Beta also allows for automatic caching for offline play on mobile devices. It is not, however, a Backup nor a Sync service. Despite this, Google Music can be viewed as the ultimate backup for your Music Library. Why? I invoke the ⅔rds Rule: Google holds at any given moment in time two thirds of the Interwebs. I can’t think of any better place to store my hard ripped music other than Google’s redundant servers. Even though they won’t provide an official means of restoring the music to your computer there will always be 3rd party tools. There’s already a Firefox extension that allows you to download one track at a time.
Even if you’ll never be able to practically restore your music in bulk, will it really matter? The future belongs to the Cloud anyway! I, for one, welcome our new cloud storage overlords!