Taylor Swift’s new album came out on Friday and being unavailable to Stream on Google Play (or Spotify and Amazon for that matter), the options were iTunes or getting the actual CD.
Since they cost the same, and with the CD you actually own the music, instead of Apple owning it and technically can take it back when they feel like, I went with the CD option, and when it showed up Friday, I wanted to upload the album to Google Play Music so I can listen to it on my phone.
Oh, how a seemingly simple task became such an unnecessary hassle.
In the past, meaning in the good old days of actual CDs in the early 2000s, you would put a disc into your computer and it would pull most of its info from the internet to populate the titles and artists, and then you could rip it to your computer in MP3 format.
Since it’s been many years since I had iTunes on my computer, the program I used to use to rip the CDs, I turned to Windows Media Player to try to do the job…yeah, that wasn’t the best.
For starters, and maybe it was because Reputation wasn’t available online, none of the data populated, even after selecting to “Get Info”, and when I put in the data manually, it was not the most user-friendly GUI.
Once I finally had the 15 songs in MP3 on my computer, I figured I can just go to the Play Music website and drag and drop the songs.
Well, they say you can…but no matter how many times I dropped it and it said “Uploading 0 out of 15”, and then that message would disappear and the songs would never show up.
So I had to go ahead and download the Music Play Manager, and after going through its surprisingly tedious setup to get the files I wanted, they finally started to upload to the Play servers.
Once they uploaded, I went to the app and saw that they had uploaded as two separate albums. Songs 1-13 on the first one…and 14-15 on the second one…and I had no options to combine them.
Instead, I made a playlist and had to put the two albums on them, making sure they were in the proper order when I did that.
It’s amazing how for every two steps forward that technology takes…it seems to take three steps back.
Aviously 