theITbaby

the IT city, the I.T. Baby

Google Play Music turns any capable device into a baby soothing station

Google Play MusicGoogle Play Music is yet another free app from Google that comes in more useful than I might have expected considering I do not really listen to much music on a daily basis. That use is for soothing my ticked off infant who for some reason loves me singing “Don’t Be Cruel,”  by Elvis Presley, along with many other fine renditions of his music.

Google Play Music loads all your music to the cloud, and then when you need it, bam it’s wherever you are. No need to remember to haul around a couple of CDs of baby music, or to load it on dad’s phone, mom’s phone, the mp3 player, sister’s iPhone, etc. Anything with a capable Google Play Music client can log in and stream the music to sooth the savage baby.

If you’re at the grandparents and dealing with a computer from the mid 2000’s, chances are it will be able to stream and play anything as long as there’s an internet connection of some sort and some speakers to rock out to.

While I’m not familiar with the Apple clients for Google Play Music, there are plenty out there a quick search reveals. The Android client I am quite a bit more familiar with and have been carrying around nearly 20,000 songs, audiobooks, language lessons, and baby music wherever I go that has any sort of internet connection.

If you’re into discovering new music, there’s also a Pandora-like all-access thing you can purchase, however at $7 a month it’s not really my thing even if I can listen to anything ever out there. Pretty neat though.

The PC side component is pretty easy to configure. I’ve got mine scanning my iTunes and MP3 directories for any changes. If something’s changed, it checks to see if it has the song already in the Google cloud. If it does, bam, done, music is linked to your account. If not, it’ll upload for you.

The app is free, only takes up the space of the app and any songs you choose to download onto your device as opposed to stream. It’s pretty useful in conjunction with using your cell phone as a baby monitor as not only can you play some soothing nighty night music, you can also use that device as a webcam.

Google Play Music is available for free on Google Play, and there are clients for it on the App Store, but I can’t recommend any as I don’t know much about the Apple clients at the moment.

4.5 / 5 stars     

Paul King

Paul King lives in Nashville Tennessee with his wife, two daughters and cats. He writes for Pocketables, theITBaby, and is an IT consultant along with doing tech support for a film production company.