Idea for Google Music and the upload issue: acoustic fingerprinting
Why should we waste our precious bandwidth on Google Music uploads? Why do we need so many copies of the same song in the cloud?
My idea is this: have Google Music Manager identify the songs in your Music directory via acoustic fingerprinting. Any good retagger already does this, and there are existing databases of tons of songs already acoustic fingerprinted, making it much easier to retag your library.
If the Music Manager identifies the fingerprint with an existing copy already on the Google servers, or any other database, don't upload, just integrate in the existing file on the servers into your personal Google Music account. If a song or album is unidentified, do upload. Have an option to report back the fingerprint for future use.
I think this would solve a lot of the issues people have on slow upload speeds and bandwidth caps. The main concern I wonder about is how secure fingerprinting is, if it can be tricked, and if the music studios will allow it.
Posted Mar 24, 2012, 10:51 PM UTC