Mountain View, California — In a fresh move that will help embellish its current emphasis on media, Google has rolled out major rebranding of its online media and app stores last month, and now the company is updating the recently-renamed Google Play Music with its own set of experimental features.
In fact, Google’s unique concept of letting their staff spend 20% of their time working on favorite projects of theirs has certainly reaped its fair share of fruit over the years, and we ourselves have ended up so accustomed to Google Labs features on most of the common services such as Gmail and Google Maps, that we often tend to forget that they are experimental in nature.
The company already has Labs, or a collection of customizable tweaks, for other popular web services, but now, Google Music, too, has become a beneficiary, where new features have been introduced to the desktop version of its web player.
The Google Play Music’s Lab is pretty scanty when it comes to selection, listing only three new lab features. Coolly sneaked in behind a new ‘music labs’ settings menu are options for Gmail-style desktop notifications, a switch for an HTML5 audio player instead of Flash, and a new ratings system.
For Chrome users, the service now gives users the option of adding track notifications that pops up the moment a new song begins playing. But the last and most notable feature in the Music Labs is the ability to enable HTML5 Audio playback. Google’s new HTML5 feature for streaming audio works in all browsers that have support for MP3 file playing over HTML5, which include Safari browser on the iPhone and iPad, Chrome and Internet Explorer. Firefox and Opera does not make the cut, as they do not support HTML5 MP3 audio.
Besides, the new ratings system offers precisely what it sounds like: a more granular way to rate your music beyond the binary thumbs-up and thumbs-down options Google Play Music normally offers. Now, you can also rate each song on a scale of 1 to 5, which is hardly a huge addition considering how many other music players already do this.
However, currently there are some invisible limitations: an unpublished limit on the amount of daily streaming allowed per user, even if users are listening to their own music that they manually uploaded to Google. Google still imply that the service offers unlimited streaming.
As with all Google Labs features, until being totally integrated into the product, they are to be considered experimental. Of course, the improvements will likely be of little concern to those outside the US, who are still waiting for Google’s music offering to expand internationally, but there has been no shortage of updates, and for those who live in the US, you might want to check things out.