Upload to Google Music. Tag the music you want on the device as "available offline", on your phone, when you have internet connectivity.

No cables. No sync. No fucking iTunes. No computer required. Just internet. Done.

If you feel old-fashioned, you can also just copy files to your device as a standard MTP or mass-storage device using USB-cables, or copy to SD-cards.

As long as the music files are properly tagged you should have everything auto-discovered on the device.

I love the process, but I've been having trouble with uploading. A lot of songs simply weren't uploaded successfully, and there is no way for me to manually upload anything in order to fix that. I have no idea if the uploader application does this automatically or if I'm just stuck with a bunch of broken songs.

Also I noticed some mistakes with generic album titles, such as "Unknown Album" - selecting an artist, then their album titled "Unknown" would usually play all the titles that don't have an album title, even the ones by entirely different artists.

That being said, it beats iTunes by miles.

So exactly like iTunes Match? Oh, except iTunes Match has a real client that allows you to manage your music instead of a crippled uploader that only allowed you to pick folders, 5000 more song storage space and smart playlist ability. Also, it doesn't require that every song be uploaded instead of matching them against songs that already exist on the server. Half of my library didn't need to be uploaded and most of the time when I add an album it matches instantly.

Google Music has a web client that is just as functional as iTunes and doesn't require a 1GB download for every update. Further, Google Music also performs matching now.

Nice completely inaccurate rant. Oh yeah, and Google Music matches at 320Kbps.

iTunes is actually 200mb+QuickTime if you're on Windows which is 80mb, and the Google Music web client is nowhere near as functional as iTunes. Next you'll try and tell me Google Docs is just as functional as Word. Nothing I said was inaccurate, except that apparently Google matches music now. I'm curious as to how they do that without ponying up to the labels, but whatever.

I actually have a Google Music account that I use in addition to iTunes Match, so I'm actually one of the few here not bullshitting my knowledge on the topic. For the record, I would trade a basically unnoticeable quality boost for an extra 5000 tracks of space any day.

You also conveniently avoided the fact that to use the less functional Google Music web client to actually DO anything, you have to upload all your music first via the shitty uploader. Which still gives you no way of managing uploading except managing a list of folders by hand.

Whereas with iTunes Match, I can download an album, clean the tags in iTunes while it's matching, and it'll be available on my phone in seconds. With the 25000 song storage space I don't need to do any managing. It all fits with plenty of breathing room.

Nice completely inaccurate reply, though. Next time try downloading iTunes next time instead of assuming it's 4x the size it actually is. Which speaks volumes as to your level of knowledge on the topic BTW.

Oh, and of course there is this: http://cl.ly/image/2P3u2C04062V

So to even use Google Music in this far off, backwards land of Canada I have to maintain a separate Google account for that purpose that is set to United States.

Apple treats Canada like a first class citizen, typically the second or 3rd launch market. Google frequently forgets we even exist and took literally years to allow people to sell apps here, and they STILL haven't brought Google Music over. Meanwhile iTunes Match has been active in something to the tune of 50 countries for almost a year now, with matching available from day one.

Look, Google Music lets me listen to my music in the web interface without taking 6 hours to index my library, consuming tons of memory, locking out my MP3 player if I plug it into a different machine and doesn't require large client updates. It matches my music in higher quality than iTunes Match.

I'm sorry you live in Canada, and I'll concede that 25K>20K.

What the hell else do you want me to say? I'll still take a wireless sync and app install system every single day of the week over iTunes.

So is DRM not an issue?

Sounds promising. Thanks for the info.

A few years ago, apple stopped encrypting music. The music is watermarked, but not encrypted anymore. These files (m4a), can be played without issue.

The older stuff, which is encrypted (m4p), can't be played. However, you can just remove the DRM using any of the available DRM removers, with no loss (they are just removing the encryption, not transcoding).

iTunes DRM tracks will likely not work, but at this point iTunes hasn't sold DRM tracks in a long time. Most (all?) other tracks have had the ability to upgrade and make DRM free for awhile now.

DRM will be an issue for any older purchased iTunes Music.

But you can pay a little more and Apple will provide non-DRM versions.

I love the nexus with one caveat. I absolutely miss iTunes and how well it integrates with the music player on the iPhone.

I am using iSync on the Nexus 4 to sync to my iTunes. But it's not quite the same. And the nexus doesn't have star ratings, just thumbs up or down.

I use star ratings to delete music from library. 1 star = delete.

iSyncr (http://www.jrtstudio.com/iSyncr)

First things first; stop buying music and movies from a store that is tied to a particular brand device. Never make this mistake again and it won't be an issue in the future. Today Amazon is probably the best choice for cross-platform cloud music, but there are others as well.