Galaxy S II: The Missing Manual

Google Music Cloud Player

THE GOOGLE MUSIC CLOUD Player may forever change the way you manage—and even think about—your music. It allows you to play music on your phone that isn’t actually on the device itself, and instead lives in what’s called the “cloud”—basically big Google computers called servers that store your music and stream it to your Galaxy S II (or any other device, for that matter).

To use it, you need to first install the software on your PC or Mac (whichever computer houses your music collection). You then tell the software to upload the music to the cloud. After that, you install the Google Music player on your Galaxy S II (or other Android device). At that point, you can listen to your music from the cloud—as long as you have a 3G, 4G, or Wi-Fi connection, of course.

The Music player isn’t a separate application; instead, it integrates directly into the Google Music player on your Galaxy S II. When you go to the Android Market, search for Google Music and then download an upgrade. The cloud player will be installed.

Mostly, the cloud player looks and works just like the normal Google Music player. There are a few differences, though. There will be times when your music won’t be available from the cloud—whenever you’re not connected to the Internet—so you can choose to hide streamed music at that point. You can also set a variety of other options, such as whether to only stream music when connected via Wi-Fi rather than via 3G or 4G.

The cloud player is freely available, ...