Google Music now lets you download MP3 copies of your stored tunes

Google Music is a "music locker" service, where you can upload your songs to the cloud, and then have the ability to stream them (as well as content you purchase from Google) direct to your laptops, tablets and phones. There was a catch, though: there wasn't an easy way to download the very music that you'd uploaded to Google's servers, until now. Today, Google's tossing users the key to that locker by making every song downloadable through either the web interface (at music.google.com) or the Music Manager desktop app. You can even download a whole bunch of tunes at once by holding down the Shift key, just like you would with files on your computer. Viva data portability! Since Google converts your songs into 320kbps MP3 files, though, that's what you'll be getting when you pull them down, and the company's also limiting users to two copies of each individual song when downloading via the web interface right now. It even works for the songs each user gets free to start: if you find your local machine craving a little more cowbell, Google has you covered.