Now that Apple has finally played its hand with iCloud at this year’s WWDC keynote, we’ve finally seen the best and brightest of what the major players plan to bring to their streaming music services. One of them, Music Beta by Google, is still an intriguing option -- one you get past the hours of uploading necessary to enjoy it in the first place.

Launched in May, the invitation-only Music Beta by Google quickly made many of us forget all about the headline-making Amazon Cloud Player initiative introduced at the end of March. While Amazon offers 5GB of free storage for every customer (with a bump to 20GB free for a year with any MP3 album purchase), Google’s offering smokes the e-tailer by offering storage for up to 20,000 tracks in the cloud -- Amazon claims 5GB works out to a mere 1,000 tracks by comparison.

Of course, both services require users to do the heavy lifting by uploading their tracks to the cloud -- and neither allows DRM’ed music, which likely isn’t such a big deal now that major players like iTunes and Amazon both offer their tracks without it. We got our hands on a beta invite -- anyone who has a Gmail account can request one -- and after signing up and installing the Music Manager software, we were ready to let the uploading roll.

Music Manager is a Mac OS X System Preferences pane that controls uploading to Music Beta, with your choice of an iTunes library, Music or other folder as source material. Where Amazon Cloud Player allows you to select only those playlists you wish to upload, Music Manager is an all or nothing affair where iTunes is concerned -- you either upload it all or you’ll have to manually select entire folders, foregoing some of the niceties carried over by iTunes, such as playlists.

Thankfully, Music Manager is better about determining when to upload and at what speed. You can choose how much bandwidth is available for uploading to the service from five choices: All Available, 1024kbps (Fast), 512kbps (Medium), 256kbps (Slow) or 128kbps (Slowest). You’ll also have three choices of when to upload tracks, from manually to intervals ranging from once per day, hour or week or automatically.

Be forewarned, the fastest “All Available” setting will really suck up your bandwidth -- even with an AT&T U-verse broadband account capable of 1.5Mbps upload and nearly 17Mbps download, it was noticeably slower to get anything else done on the internet while tracks were uploading in the background. Most of the time we left it on the 512kbps (Medium) setting while working throughout the day, toggling it back to All Available while the computer was idle.

So how long does it take to get an entire music collection up to Music Beta? In our case, 6,762 tracks (amounting to 33.30GB of data) were uploaded in about four and a half days, which sounds like a long time until you factor in the computer was turned off at night and the upload speed throttled back during the day while working. Needless to say, if your broadband is currently being capped, you’ll want to upload a little bit each month to spare yourself the pain of overage fees.

As expected, the service skipped 99 DRM’ed music tracks as well as movies, music videos, Audible audiobooks and .m4a Voice Memos from the iPhone, which are unsupported. That left us with 6,602 total songs uploaded according to Music Manager -- well, almost. We experienced a little hiccup that the Music Beta engineers are still working through which left 20 tracks in limbo -- Music Manager reports them as already uploaded, but the Music Beta player refuses to show them. Oddly, the tracks in question are all from a handful of albums that were otherwise uploaded just fine.

This one anomaly aside, porting our iTunes library to Music Beta was otherwise a cinch (if not a time-consuming one). All of our playlists were recreated on Music Beta, save for Smart Playlists -- a bit of a bummer considering we frequently use a few of them. However, the lack of Smart Playlists wasn’t a total surprise, considering that even desktop sync management software such as SuperSync fails to access such playlists.

Thankfully, creating new playlists in Music Beta is a cinch, and if you happen to use star ratings to mark favorites in iTunes, you’ll find all of those tracks in the “Thumbs up” auto playlist in Music Beta. Ratings are either “thumbs up” or “thumbs down” in Music Beta, so anything in-between gets pushed to one extreme or another -- it’s either starred or it’s not. Play counts also carry over to Music Beta, although future plays via Music Beta don’t get synced back to iTunes.

Music Beta’s web-based interface works like a champ with Safari and other modern desktop browsers, offering easy access to five key categories including New and recent, Songs, Artists, Albums and Genres as well as three auto playlists (the aforementioned Thumbs up, Recently added and Free songs, a collection of tracks from a variety of genres that Google offers during setup).

Google includes what they call “Instant Mixes,” a collection of 25 songs pulled from your collection when you select any single track and click the “+” button to create such a mix. We selected the Johnny Cash classic “I Walk the Line” and used it to create the “I Walk the Line Mix,” mostly culled from similar country tracks in our collection (including a handful of other Cash faves), but your mileage may vary depending on what kind of music you like.

It’s easy to delete unwanted playlists or tracks by clicking on the small triangle in the bottom right corner of a selection, which also offers a number of choices depending on what you’ve selected. For example, individual tracks give the option to Play song, Make instant mix, Add song to playlist, Edit song info, Remove from playlist or Shop this Artist -- but don’t get excited, there’s no Google paid music service (yet). Such links simply take you to a Google Shopping search showing audio CDs available for purchase near your location. How quaint!

At the bottom of the Music Beta browser window are the usual playback controls -- skip back, play, skip forward, track information (cover art, title and artist name), current location and runtime, thumbs up or down buttons, the usual options to shuffle or repeat songs and a volume control. You’re free to browse elsewhere while tracks are playing, and you can click on the track information at bottom to jump back to the playlist currently in use.

With the Music Beta window selected, you can also use the keyboard to control basic playback -- the Space bar starts and stops playback, while the left and right arrow keys handle the back and forward tasks. You can also move up or down through a playlist with the up or down arrow keys, and delete a selected song with the Delete key. It’s a nice touch for those of us used to controlling iTunes playback from the keyboard.

Perhaps our favorite Music Beta feature is the Search field at top -- start typing and you’ll be greeted with the name of artists, albums and songs that match your search, updated live as you type. Of course, from a company like Google, we’d expect nothing less, but we found it was faster to jump to the music we wanted using this method over any other.

Tracks play without a hitch after a short pause to get streaming going, and it’s easy to spot which song is playing thanks to a pair of small animated audio meters to the left of the current track. On the downside, Music Beta doesn’t pre-buffer audio during playback, which means that gapless tracks will have a brief moment of delay when one track ends and another begins.

While you can have multiple devices (unlimited computers and up to eight Android devices) linked to the same account for Music Beta, Google claims that only one of them can actually play music at a time. However, we were able to play different tracks from two computers at once without a problem, so they’re likely referring to desktop and mobile devices. Also, only two Google Accounts per computer can be used to upload music to the service.

While Music Beta works great on computers, it’s a mixed bag when it comes to mobile devices. There’s no dedicated iOS client for the service as yet (Google, can we haz this, please?), although it works relatively well in Mobile Safari. Not surprisingly, Android users get to have all the fun here, with a fresh new Music app that ties neatly into the cloud-based service, complete with artwork, playlists and the works -- and that applies even to the latest Honeycomb 3.0 tablets as well.

Although Music Beta works on Music Beta, the desktop version must be using some kind of Adobe Flash technology -- on two different systems with the ClickToFlash extension installed, Music Beta threw up an error whining about refreshing the page and to “make sure you have Flash enabled and working” whenever we tried to play a track. Adding the service URL to our ClickToFlash whitelist got things working again.

Despite the few quirks noted here, we’ve actually gotten far more use out of Music Beta by Google than we did from our brief use of Amazon Cloud Player after it launched in March. That may have something to do with the fact that our entire collection is now available from anywhere on Music Beta (minus those 20 tracks troublesome tracks), since even the 20GB free bump from Amazon isn’t enough to house our entire 33GB+ collection.

For now at least, Music Beta simply works better and has more to offer -- although that’s subject to change once Google works out how much they plan to charge for the service. It’s free for now, but that may not last forever, so get those invites in now while the getting is good, particularly if you have an Android device to take advantage of it with.

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