MUSIC: A FULL RETRACTION

I hate admitting I'm wrong. I'll do almost anything to avoid it. I'll go to extreme lengths to prove my point and I'll argue it to the death. I may even fake evidence if absolutely necessary. I was 3rd speaker on my debating team at school. I didn't even need to believe the argument, I was literally disagreeing for the sake of it.

However, when it comes to enjoying music on my Samsung Galaxy SIII, and this hurts me to write more than I can say, I was wrong. So wrong. Way wrong. Wrongiddy wrong wrong the wronging wrong.

And it's all because of Google Play Music.

Last time I wrote about music on smartphones, I was struggling to sync things onto my S3 from my iTunes playlists. I may have been a bit hasty. Since then, I've persisted, primarily because of the other features of the phone. I gave up trying to sync things with Kies, an application that tries to work either via USB or Wifi, but just took forever if it worked at all.

In fact, once I uninstalled Kies, everything functioned a lot better. I now keep the playlists I want up to date on my handset using Easy Phone Sync, a more stripped down program, but it works and it works quickly.

What's more important is now if I'm in Wifi range, it literally no longer matters if I have any music saved on my phone at all. Thanks to Google Play Music, I can access my entire music collection through my phone.

I'm not sure what Apple are trying to do with the iTunes Radio service they revealed last week, but they're probably trying to replicate what Google has been doing for a while, the difference being, you can access Google Play Music from a variety of devices.

Using the Google Play Music Manager on your PC, you can upload as many as 20,000 songs from your iTunes library - playlists, podcasts and all. They are then available from anywhere, all you have to do is log in.

I've found the streaming to be amazingly stable, probably due to the way the Play Music app caches songs in advance. You can even download songs and playlists to your phone on the go.

In short, finally, I have the ability to access my entire music collection in a way I've never been able to before, even when it was just a stack of CD's under the coffee table. The chances of me fossicking through over 1000 albums just because I felt like listening to one particular song would be about zero. Now I can search for it on my phone just as easily as I can using iTunes on my PC.

This is what I've been waiting for since I spent a stupid amount of time digitising my collection. Now, at last, I can finally LISTEN to it.