I’ve been using Google Music Manager to upload my collection to the cloud (primarily as a free backup solution), but I’ve had one small problem. The rate limiting options are kind of arbitrary, and don’t always match what I want.
I have pretty crappy uplink bandwidth at my home – somewhere around 0.5 Mbps (which is NOT kp/s or MB/s). As a result, it’s pretty easy to choke my upward bandwidth by setting Google Music to “Fastest Possible”. I can set it lower – but say when I’m at university with a 250Mbps upspeed connection (over wifi!), I don’t want to be limited to a tenth that. What I needed was an external program to configure the speed at each runtime.
trickle is that program for *nix systems. It’s a commandline program, but that’s okay.
I installed trickle, then use this command to run Google Music (which is set to use “fastest possible”) when I have limited bandwidth:
trickle -s -u 20 /opt/google/musicmanager/google-musicmanager
This limits the upward bandwidth to 0.2Mbps, which works well for still being able to use my internet connection. Then the rest of the time I use the default command to take advantage of the higher internet speeds elsewhere.
This isn’t a vital thing to use with Google Music – as mentioned, the Music Manager has built-in rate limiting. It’s not quite what I want, but it’s not bad. But I mention it – and the syntax – because other programs don’t have that kind of limitation. You can use trickle with just about any program when you need it. Pretty awesome stuff.
This fixed obscene CPU usage issues I was experiencing with Google Play Music Manager. It also successfully limits the bandwidth, and the builtin option definitely was not. Great suggestion.
Great! Glad it helped!