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Google Play Music no more

Started by buntyman, August 14, 2020, 03:10:43 AM

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buntyman

Not sure how popular Google Play Music amongst you lot but I'm pretty gutted that it's being discontinued. I know it isn't the best streaming service in terms of interface, exclusive playlists etc but as far as I know it's the only one that let you upload your personal music collection and have it integrate with the music in the subscription catalogue. I've really liked the option of putting on a random or a themed 'radio' channel and have it play music from my own collection interspersed with other music of a similar genre for me to discover. It's also been good that it's had my whole music collection accessible anywhere with an internet connection, even without a paid subscription to Google Music.

There's the option to transfer all your saved collection over to Youtube, which I've done, but it then stores it all separately to the Youtube subscription music in a big long list of tracks and not even divided by albums. Anyone else feeling helpless and miserable about this state of affairs?

bgmnts

Shit really? I don't even know to play my music on my phone not using Google Play, short of actually opening the file.


Chriddof

Another one for the Google Graveyard.

On my phone I use the app version of VLC Media Player. It's on Android, don't know about Apple phones.


olliebean

Have you tried making a playlist on YouTube Music? It doesn't let you change the order of the tracks once you've added them. What sort of insane bollocks is that?

Neomod

Just got a new phone and Google Play Music was the default player. I must be a design snob because I resent seeing ads when I'm playing my own mp3's.

Downloaded Power Audio Free. No ads, aesthetically pleasing. Jobs a good'un.

kalowski

YTM is fucking awful. I've now taken to using Astiga, which I link to.my Dropbox account so I can, in theory, stream any of my digital collections anywhere. Only problem being I think it uses much more data than Play or YTM, and Google still can't manage to get my phone (Google Pixel) to consistently cast to their own fucking device (Google Home).

SteveDave

This is why I've still got an iPod.

The Mollusk

Quote from: buntyman on August 14, 2020, 03:10:43 AM
as far as I know it's the only one that let you upload your personal music collection and have it integrate with the music in the subscription catalogue.

Spotify lets you do this, to an extent. There is a separate part of the app for "Local Files" and you can also add any of those tracks to your existing playlists. It doesn't transfer to other devices though.

Sebastian Cobb

It's like google reader all over again, kill it to promote an app that doesn't actually do the same thing. I'm not going to convert to YT music out of stubbornness and would be part of the numbers that didn't convert.

It doesn't look like there are people offering the same service apart from apple, which won't work for me given I mostly use android and linux.

I was looking at home jukebox solutions, I'd really like one that can stream from the server to my chromecast audio's (rather than through my phone) but that doesn't seem the done thing. So the next best option is spinning up an instance of plex, which I could make available on the internet as well to get google music like capability without being at the whims of dickish big tech.


Glyn

I expected it to be bad but was still shocked at how awful YouTube music is compared to Play Music. The ability to upload your own music , edit metadata, download whenever you need it, and integrate it into a store for new purchases was the whole reason I used it and it did a good job of that.

Looked around and haven't seen much that meets the bill so will probably just buy a large memory card and move what I can back onto my phone.

QDRPHNC

Yes, I'm really quite pissed about it. I rely heavily on Google Drive and GSuite for work, so I bought completely into the Google ecosystem, including getting a Pixel.

Google Music isn't pretty or well refined, but it does what it needs to do perfectly well. And I was enjoying not having to maintain my library on a hard drive over here, an sd card over there.

And I know that there's other cloud streaming options out there, but the good thing about Google Music was that I didn't have to maintain yet another fucking account for it.

I haven't brought myself to move my library over yet, but I may as well get to it today, I suppose.

Sebastian Cobb

Quote from: QDRPHNC on August 14, 2020, 02:22:16 PM
Google Music isn't pretty or well refined, but it does what it needs to do perfectly well.

Its instant mix feature was pretty fantastic though, probably the sort of thing that benefited from big listening data.

QDRPHNC

To be fair, there could be more to it that I realized, I only used it for the most basic playback and playlist-building. I guess I was referring more to the interface, which is a bit clunky and missing some very basic things (eg. why can't we view our music as a list instead of those big ugly circles? Why can't we upload our own artist images?). It would have been nice to see the Google UX and UI designers give it the same attention they gave Gmail or Photos, for example.

But yeah, having said all that. Solid piece of software.

olliebean

Quote from: The Mollusk on August 14, 2020, 10:00:41 AM
Spotify lets you do this, to an extent. There is a separate part of the app for "Local Files" and you can also add any of those tracks to your existing playlists. It doesn't transfer to other devices though.

No, it doesn't let you upload your personal music collection. It lets you access your personal music collection, if you have it on the same device as you're using Spotify on. The thing with Google Play Music was you could upload it so you can access it anywhere without having to make space on your device for it. (You still can with YouTube Music, but you can't edit or download it after uploading it, and it's less useful in other ways as well.)

buntyman

Maybe if they'd made more of an effort to promote what made Google Play Music so good and different to the other options it might have done better. Annoyingly Youtube Music seems to be the next best option for combining subscription-based music and a cloud for your own saved music but it's implemented so much worse. Maybe lots of people will complain and they'll improve Youtube Music but its probably more likely that it'll flop and disappear too.

idunnosomename

Quote from: Chriddof on August 14, 2020, 04:48:03 AM
Another one for the Google Graveyard.
off-topic but cloud print getting killed is ridiculous. my library service uses it and it was great. fuck google

Sebastian Cobb

I didn't realise AngularJS was being killed, I thought that was still fairly common.

Old Thrashbarg

iBroadcast seems like a pretty great replacement so far. Very simple concept (upload your music, play your music), with a lot of customisability and unlimited storage. Presumably selling user data to the highest bidder to make it viable, but that's a price I'm willing to pay.

Pseudopath

Quote from: Sebastian Cobb on August 15, 2020, 09:16:59 AM
I didn't realise AngularJS was being killed, I thought that was still fairly common.

That's a bit disingenuous of them, to be fair. It still lives on as Angular (which is essentially a complete rewrite, but is maintained by the same team at Google) and is still a hugely popular framework.

Glyn

Quote from: Old Thrashbarg on August 15, 2020, 09:22:06 AM
iBroadcast seems like a pretty great replacement so far. Very simple concept (upload your music, play your music), with a lot of customisability and unlimited storage. Presumably selling user data to the highest bidder to make it viable, but that's a price I'm willing to pay.

Cheers, will check that out. I'm surprised there aren't many alternatives for cloud music storage but perhaps both the success of streaming and the the logistics of compiling different uploads into a cohesive and useable service makes it more complex than I imagine ?

For the convenience I'd probably have paid a fee (or taken a low level Google One subscription) if they had kept Play Music going in some way but I guess most wouldn't.

It's a bit odd how a few years ago (ok, maybe more than a few but it feels like a short time to me)  I'd never have thought that my digital collection would replace the physical ,and now I'm debating how best to keep that digital collection going vs. just using streaming.

Paaaaul

Quote from: Old Thrashbarg on August 15, 2020, 09:22:06 AM
iBroadcast seems like a pretty great replacement so far. Very simple concept (upload your music, play your music), with a lot of customisability and unlimited storage. Presumably selling user data to the highest bidder to make it viable, but that's a price I'm willing to pay.
You can only stream at 128 kbps.

spaghetamine

Used to share an account with my buddy and we made some ace collaborative playlists, RIP.


Old Thrashbarg

Quote from: Paaaaul on August 15, 2020, 03:57:10 PM
You can only stream at 128 kbps.

Yeah, it's not ideal, though there is a premium service in development that will apparently allow streaming at the original bitrate of the uploaded file.

Sebastian Cobb

Quote from: Glyn on August 15, 2020, 01:28:29 PM
Cheers, will check that out. I'm surprised there aren't many alternatives for cloud music storage but perhaps both the success of streaming and the the logistics of compiling different uploads into a cohesive and useable service makes it more complex than I imagine ?


Storage and the cloud infrastructure to stream the stuff out again all costs money, I'm guessing the listening data on it's own wasn't enough to pay for the service. Notice how Youtube music includes ads or you pay a subscription. Of course you could charge for it, but it'll be a pretty niche user-base you've got when people could pay for Spotify/Prime/Tidal/whatever and have access to much bigger libraries.

Oh yeah, forgot to add, it seems amazon prime has a cloud upload deely, although they seem to keep quiet about it.

Old Thrashbarg

Quote from: Sebastian Cobb on August 15, 2020, 06:36:24 PM
Oh yeah, forgot to add, it seems amazon prime has a cloud upload deely, although they seem to keep quiet about it.

They used to, but I thought they'd binned it a couple of years ago. And even then it was limited to something stupid like 250 songs before you had to pay extra. Music purchased through Amazon (CD or MP3) will appear in your library automatically from what I remember, but I think that's it apart from their streaming service now.

olliebean

Quote from: Old Thrashbarg on August 15, 2020, 05:00:56 PM
Yeah, it's not ideal, though there is a premium service in development that will apparently allow streaming at the original bitrate of the uploaded file.

And you can currently use the beta for free: https://www.ibroadcast.com/premium/

pandadeath

Sorry to drag up an old thread, but it's getting close to the time when Play Music will be switched off. I've been an avid user of Play Music since it launched in the UK and I'm pretty pissed off about it getting shut down but begrudgingly moved my library over to Youtube Music in preparation for making the switch in October (or whenever they finally pull the plug). The lack of features and poor interface aside, the face that it merges your Music history with your YouTube watch history is absolutely baffling - I use the watch history feature every day but unless I pony up for a family account and create a dedicated Music account then I'm going to have to keep pausing the watch history whenever I want to listen to music on my phone.

Play Music is so convenient and useful, it's obviously evolved plenty in the 10 years it's been around but I don't remember it being unintuitive or without vital features when it launched - it just worked from the get go. Google have been pushing Youtube Music for a couple of years now but it's still a mess, I'll give it a chance but I'm not optimistic it'll ever match its predecessor.

I've got so used to watching ad free Youtube that I'm loathe to stop paying the subscription and switch to another streaming service (or invest in a sizeable SD card and store all my music on my phone). Don't know why Google can't just eat the cost and keep Play Music running as a legacy service.

QDRPHNC

#27
They make strange decisions sometimes.

Google Photos on my phone just launched the unturnoffable Recent Highlights feature. Which, when I open the app, takes up the entire top half of the screen, and which is there to simply link me to a slideshow of my recent pictures. That is, the pictures that would be directly on the screen for my convenience if the Recent Highlights thing wasn't there.

olliebean

Years ago when they decided YouTube accounts had to be linked to Google Plus accounts, they created a new YouTube account for me that had none of my subscriptions or uploaded or favourited videos on it. I had to look up at the time how to switch back to my original account, and as I recall it meant I was unable to comment on YT videos until Google eventually sacked off Google+. But it turns out, the new account they created for me then and that I haven't used since is what they consider to be my primary YouTube account, and hence the only one that supports the upload of my own files to YouTube music (and the transfer of files from my Google Play Music account). So the upshot is that I'm having to use two separate accounts, for YouTube and YouTube Music. Perhaps the one advantage of this is that I haven't got my YouTube history and favourites all mixed up with my YTM activity.

kalowski

I fucking hate You Tube music. And I don't get the streaming side of it.
The Hendrix thread put me in the mood for Electric Ladyland. It's not on You Tube Music. But it is on Google Play Music.
What the fuck?
You Tube music appears to be the worst music streaming software in the history of time.