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These accounts also have unlimited music storage space. The other cross-platform music locker of note is Amazon, which turned some heads last year when they began offering free upgrades to 20GB accounts with any album purchase. Google’s Music Manager keeps your cloud up to date while sitting quietly in the background.
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That’s more than enough for most users, and you never have to worry about manually backing up. Google has confirmed that accounts will remain free, and you can put 20,000 tracks in your account. This simple change means that Google Music makes enormous sense as a music backup service. Should you ever lose any music, anything you uploaded to, or bought from Google can be restored. Under the new policy, you can use the Google Music Manager software to download the entire library, or songs can be downloaded individually from the web interface (although you are limited to two downloads per track there). Only purchased songs could be downloaded to a local PC, which made Google Music a pretty awful backup option. Many users spent days getting all their songs into Google only to realize that, in some misguided effort to appease overly-cautious music labels, those songs were stuck in the cloud. When Google Music launched, it offered users a handy desktop app that monitored the entire music library on a PC, helpfully uploading new tunes to the cloud. The result might be the ultimate free music locker. The search giant’s cloud music service added a new feature this week US users can now download their entire MP3 library, both purchased and uploaded tunes. At least one digital locker is bucking the trend: Google Music. After all, you don’t want to lose all your media if the worst happens. In the wake of the Megaupload takedown, it might seem like a good time to back away from increasingly locked-down cloud storage. This site may earn affiliate commissions from the links on this page.
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