> ...upload all of your own music yourself, which would take forever...
Does anyone know if they actually upload the files, or just upload if a hash of the file doesn't exist? I have a hard time believing that Google hasn't already thought of this. I imagine that less than 5% of your music actually has to go over the wire once google has a large collection of music on their servers.
I can't speak for Google, but Amazon doesn't do it. It took 41 hours to upload my collection (not counting podcasts, which for whatever absurd reason are not supported) to Cloud Player and I have a 15mbps fios connection. If I had a regular cable modem or whatever I probably wouldn't have bothered.
You are probably right, though they should just call it "distributed hash compression technology for super-fast uploads", rather than "if we already have a copy of that song, it doesn't need to be re-uploaded".
Does anyone know if they actually upload the files, or just upload if a hash of the file doesn't exist? I have a hard time believing that Google hasn't already thought of this. I imagine that less than 5% of your music actually has to go over the wire once google has a large collection of music on their servers.