Google to pull plug on Play Music, its streaming service that couldn't beat Spotify, in favour of YouTube Music Google will begin the process of shutting down its Play Music streaming service later this month, concluding in December when the tech giant nukes all user-uploaded tracks. This phased approach will leave users unable to purchase or pre-order tracks through the service, and punters will also find themselves unable to upload …
google drive, then installed a sync client to automatically download them onto my phone and use vlc to play them. 99% the functionality of google music without any fuss and it can even do really advanced stuff like playing music with the screen off. If only youtube music's engineers could manage something as complex as that!
Hmm, that's OK if you're already paying for google drive or if you only have 15GB of music. For someone like me with 150GB that's £8 a month which is almost the cost of a streaming music subscription. Anyone recommend any free alternatives for uploading your own music to the cloud?
Even dynamic ips stay for months or years on end in my experience, and changing once in a blue moon is trivial.
My current phone has 256 GB storage and everything I’m like to want to listen to is on it in lossless. No chance I’m going to hand over money to have music I already own delivered to me over the air.
Every consumer brand offers some form of ability to use a service for a simple hostname.
Just be careful what you open to the internet especially if a consumer NAS (Don't rely on uPNP), if possible use a VPN to your NAS (Again most have easy to install OpenVPN packages which hardens security).
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Buy a big microSD.
Seriously.
128Gb Samsung is £17 on Amazon at the moment.
I mean... being a music lover and all, you DID buy a phone with a microSD slot, right?
And when your entire collection can sit on a tiny card, I see no point having a cloud service for it at all. But if you wanted one, just about any home NAS with the default software will do what you want.
Afaik - the issue with the free YaToob needing the device to be unlocked only applies when you're streaming media. If you have local content it should play it with the screen locked.
For me, I've always just used local content on my device, and at present I use Omnia as my media player. Works for me...
And cars these days come with USB slots where you can plug in a thumb drive with many GB of music, audio books, old radio plays, etc, and play them through the "entertainment system". On my car (a Chevrolet), you can search by all the usual tags: artist, album, folder, genre, etc.
I wish I had kept all my old Goon Show recordings...
All available here... https://archive.org/search.php?query=goon+show&and[]=subject%3A%22The+Goon+Show%22
I wish I had kept all my old Goon Show recordings...
The Goon Show - 86 episodes available at the time of writing.
get_iplayer - download and transfer to USB to your heart's content. Has the advantage of including meta information that you probably didn't have on your old recordings. Use of the "--pid-recursive" option is highly recommended.
Assuming you are outside the UK you may be limited in exactly what you can download, but for those of us in the UK, it's fantastic.
M.
A work around to get unlimited song streaming is to use something like FFMPEG to make all your music tracks into videos, and then you can upload them to the Google photos service as long as you use the option of unlimited storage.
You could make the videos a low resolution and just a black screen with the artist and track title to reduce used data when streaming.
I just sync (via Dropbox) what I need. I have around 30-40 GB of stuff but it doesnt need synching constantly and then I don't need an internet connection to listen. It's mostly paid for which means the musicians get paid more (not that I really care). 150 GB should be easy enough with an SD card, though I'd cut out the middle man and plug the phone into the computer.
>>Hmm, that's OK if you're already paying for google drive or if you only have 15GB of music. For someone like me with 150GB that's £8 a month which is almost the cost of a streaming music subscription. Anyone recommend any free alternatives for uploading your own music to the cloud?
Why do you expect to be given 150Gb for free?
> Anyone recommend any free alternatives for uploading your own music to the cloud?
I switched from Google Play Music to self-hosting Subsonic ages ago. There's a free-er fork of Subsonic now, but I haven't got around to trying it
There's also Ampache which does the same thing.
On the phone end, spend £3 to buy Dsub - it's better than the free subsonic app and will work with Ampache as well (so if you switch backends it's all good). It locally caches music so you don't need to always be able to reach the backend.
Depending on your needs, running it on the NAS at home should be more than sufficient
Google offering a Desktop client? Unlikely. You're supposed to use the music.youtube.com website, or the phone app.
I have a large iTunes library which I've never quite escaped from. Having this run on Android has always been a bit annoying (need Apple Music subscription for the proper app). Google Play Music did an OK job of uploading my iTunes library and letting me use my iTunes playlists, though it was buggy.
Anyone got any tips? I used a 3rd party sync agent but it was also annoying enough that I gave up with it.
I did this as soon as I heard they were culling PlayMusic.
I can recommend buying the lifetime subscription as £80 is a bargain for all you get. The playback is the best I've had on a mobile app, love the level balancing across your whole collection and the nice fades between tracks. I recommend the PlexApp android app for playback too, very slick only missing homescreen widgets which actually are not too much of a loss now they've improved the notification media controls.
"buying the lifetime subscription" is all very good, but who's lifetime are we talking here? A mayfly? A decent show on the FOX network? DisneyCorp's idea of how long Copyright (theirs, not anyone else's) should last?
Time, as Zaphod Beeblebrox pointed out, is an illusion...
I found VLC was jumping tracks before completing them, when trying to play an album onto a home wireless network of several Chromecast audio and smart speaker devices. Plex was far more reliable and easy to control from an Android phone - just a one-off payment of £3 required to use the App. Indexes a large collection if FLAC files, about 500GB, quickly. Very annoyed with Google that they expect us to pay a full YouTube Music subscription just to play back, in background, tracks we already bought on equipment we also bought from them.
Yes it is primarily a streaming service. However Google Play allows you to buy music, but according to something I saw yesterday, they're about to stop selling music as well. Which means I need to find an alternative site for buying music if I can't or don't want to buy physical media for those items.
Harder to get the music I'm looking for, as they relied on the ever-so-sparse subset that Google Play or whyTunes would make available in the US. And buying physical copies means I'd have to set up a remailer from Japan (or get them sent to the Tokyo HQ of the company my brother works for, and have them forwarded in interoffice mail).
I'm perfectly willing to support the Touhou Doujin music scene, if I could just get the product.
The YouTube Music app absolutely sucks.
After a lengthy career ripping off MP3s, I saw the light and became a legit above board streamer. The Google Play family subscription was the right price and had all the choonz and features I wanted.
Sadly, I think I will use this opportunity to look at other options (probably become a sheep and join Spotify).
Anyone got any better ideas?
Deezer works well for me. When I researched the streaming services, it came out best in terms of stream quality. It's got all the artists you might want, desktop app, mobile app, family profiles so you can share it and so on. It also works with google assistant so when I'm in the car with Android Auto, I can just say "hey google, play awesome playlist on Deezer" and away we go.
I’ve been using amazon music for years.
If you already have prime you can get a steep discount if you pay yearly. Works out something like £6.66 per month.
There’s also a ‘hd’ tier addon that I subscribe to. Most stuff available, at minimum, as standard Flac, with most new releases being 24bit audio. That’s also cheaper if you pay yearly.
They also do a family plan, though I’ve never used it.
No, I don’t work for amazon. Just, if you have prime already, it may work out cheaper than the competition.
They also do trials, in fact the only reason I joined in the first place was an initial 4 months for 99p offer.
It worked, because once it expired, I stayed on.
It's quite easy to remove unwanted applications from Android phones without having to resort to root access, even the Google ones like Play Music - but especially all the Samsung crud. Tends to improve phone performance and with fewer applications running, a smaller security footprint to worry about too.
Here's a couple of the many guides on how to do this: https://www.xda-developers.com/uninstall-carrier-oem-bloatware-without-root-access/ or https://www.xda-developers.com/disable-system-app-bloatware-android/ (I'm not affiliated in any way with this site, it's just pretty useful at times)
iTunes had a nice feature that ripped any music CD to MP3. When google said I could synch my "collection", I just synched that folder. It tended to have iTunes cruft in there so when I synched that back to my new PC(s) this increasingly insignificant junk came too.
For some time Google has been telling me to link it with its latest offering I have been prepared for it to dump music.google.com in the same way as other useful things have been dumped in the past. I have no interest in an additional streaming app. Spotify is fine. I just like the option of saving what I have bought and paid for in such a way that I can play it on my phone, tablet or whatever. Yes, I could easily rig something up round my house but, sometimes, I go out the door!
Yeah - went into that after several years - I used to own an ipod. My collection is still there so probably need to download the tracks that aren't on Spotify - there are a few on there that haven't been released by the labels for Spotify.
It's been a long time since I had MP3's on my computer.
It's been a long time since I had MP3's on my computer.
Are you kidding? I still have vinyl. And cassettes. And CDs.
(OK, wise guy, I hear you asking if I have 8-Tracks too. I have some here, but they were so I could digitize them for someone else; they're not MY tapes. Just have to fix my player).
There you go, Samsung. That's why giving up on your (frankly superior) music player and directing everybody to use Google Music instead was a real dick move.
Not only is your app better (thankfully it is still around so I downloaded and installed it) but you clearly never learned the lesson about Google's propensity for coming up with cool ideas, making half-ass implementations, and then killing them a few years later.
Just read and learn: https://killedbygoogle.com/
Hi,
I found that uploading real CDs (remember them?) of quite obscure sounds (Bhuddist chant, Native American, birdsong etc) onto Google Play Music allows my disabled mother to talk to the mni Google home speaker thingummybob to play, repeat, change volume etc. "Hey Google, play mum's birdsong" "OK, here's your Google Play playlist called Mum's Birdsong". So now I need a voice controlled speaker that will do the same thing on the LAN.
Are you willing to build the system yourself? There are a few things you can do to get that working. Various projects exist allowing a Raspberry Pi to relay audio to such a service, so you just have to replace the recognition on their servers with recognition running locally (CMU Sphinx has proven to be an effective library for me). Of course, you then have to provide your own list of commands and actions to take when commands are heard, so it's not labor-free.
There are also some open voice assistants that run using local software. I've seen types that use a Pi as the brain, which are more open and configurable but sometimes less powerful. This one is probably the most famous, but I have never used it and I don't know whether it's capable of everything you want. I've seen others that use an Android device to power them because by doing so they can use Google's dictation function (requires an additional download but then can recognize offline) instead of building that themselves. That would also work, but initial configuration or recovery should the host device shut down isn't as straightforward as with a Pi. If you want to investigate those options, try searching for voice assistants on FDroid or Github. If you set up either option with a speaker of high enough quality, this should work.
Cool. The Mini did always play some random rubbish off of YouTube when one of the uploaded tracks (which had been played about 3000 times) suddenly stopped working and had to be deleted and re-uploaded. Maybe I'll delete everything, upload them on YouTube music, and see if it "just works" (TM)
Cheers for the reply!
They've been rather aggressive for months at trying to push you across, I'm sticking out till the end as the play music site is better than your youtube music for how I listen (I listen to randomly generated playlist from a particular track and the "recent" in play music lets me access these relatively easily, youtube music does not, especially as some playlists are missing entirely after I did the "migrate" sync).
I get culling a little used platform, especially when you have two, but, given literally no one I've told about it knew about it that'd probably account for a lot, google really do seem to be terrible at advertising their good features (ironic for an advertising company) which leads to this sort of thing, there's not really any need for youtube music to have been developed, they could've just pushed people to play music.
Exactly, this should be of no surprise and will also not be the last. A subscription is just that, a payment for a service to a third party that can be stopped at any time. This is also the issue with all these services where you never actually own the material, you just rent it and have permission to play or read it.
The only plus in this case is that there is time to get stuff out.
At least with a CD or electronic download of a CD from the publisher you actually have a copy you can do what you like with. Storage is cheap enough now that 1000's of CDs or DVDs can fit on a USB portable disk as a backup and be kept in a safe place. Hell, have two copies, it is still cheaper than a subscription or a simple NAS lurking in a garage or something.
They've been rather aggressive for months at trying to push you across,
YouTube's tactics (along with their hostile adverts that interrupt videos mid-WORD) means I'm always on the lookout for YT alternative apps that kill the adverts before they can even load. Oh, and those fucking end-of-video cards.
The thing about the web YouTube music is how difficult they seem to make it for you to listen to an album you have uploaded. Search defaults to online media rather than your library, and then when you switch to your uploads, it lists all the music in a random order. Trying to actually find the album is a nightmare.
"Search defaults to online media rather than your library, and then when you switch to your uploads, it lists all the music in a random order. Trying to actually find the album is a nightmare."
It's funny how open source s/w such as Kodi allow you to select how things are sorted or displayed, have multiple options for showing lists in different ways and many, many complete new skins to changes things so you get pretty much exactly what YOU want in a media player. But most of the paid ones and ALL of the branded ones such as from Google,m Netflix, Amazon etc, with their huge dev and advertising budgets can't seem to offer even the most basic user customisation options. It's their way or the highway.
I do not trust these music subscription services because music can suddenly disappear down the memory hole for for licensing reasons, discontinued service or whatever, also, they give appalling returns to artists.
I still buy my music in complete albums and keep them locally in uncompressed format (backed up of course) and let itunes organise it. (Won't use the itunes cloud service either, tried it once and it rearranged a bunch of albums incorrectly, and don't like it automatically compressing my music for me).
Agree. It's bloody annoying to have carefully bookmarked a bunch of songs on Spotify only to come back later and find them marked as "unpayable". All just because of bean counters and greed. Anything I find on Spotify that I like I tend to go to Bandcamp or 7Digital and buy it, then I know I'l always have a copy.
"it rearranged a bunch of albums incorrectly"
Sometimes, Albums, playlist, tv series etc are released in a different order in different parts of the world for various reasons. I find online source designed to list album tracks or TV series by adding metadata etc are invariably based on what was released in the USA and sometimes orders stuff for me in ways I don't it to or adds incorrect metadata to what it deems is the correct track based on the track number.
Looks like I'm not going to be migrating my music to YouTube, then...
I found Play Music very convenient; I ripped new CDs I bought [1] my CDs via a desktop to my NAS, and then uploaded them to Play Music, which made them available on my phone and other portable devices. And I could 'pin' favourite albums to the phone, so could play them when I had no connection.
<sigh> So now more research and tech implementation required
[1] I'm definitely of the generation that buys, not rents, its music. Spotify? Fuck off
Default music source in Google Assistant is Spotify, therefore under the current Google ecosystem, the following works :
"Hey Google - Play x" = plays from Spotfiy
"Hey Google - Read y" = plays from my Google Books audiobook library
"Hey Google - Play z from my Google Play Music" = play music (incl my own ripped audiobooks) from my Google Play Music uploads
I migrated my library to You Tube Music - all has appeard OK in browser and plays OK.
However.......
"Hey Google - Play z from my YouTube Music" gets "Sorry, the ability to select a track or album from your library is only available to YouTube Premium subscribers"
So I have now lost the ability to play selected tracks without signing up.....(before a pile on ensues about researching etc, I only have a small library I was happy to use/sacrifice as a test, so wasn't too worried if this was the outcome for me, but still - ugh)
I’m a GPM sub and still hate YTM. Even though I’ve sync’d my profile and uploaded tracks, YTM still acts like it knows nothing about me and my preferences. I am loath to reteach a Google product what I do and don’t want to hear come out of my speaker. Plus, YT cover tracks are not what I’m paying for! If I ask for the Beetles, I expect the first hit to be the Beetles not some tween on a Ukulele.
The really crap thing about YTM as opposed to GPM is you lose the ability to stream music unless the app is front and centre. You can no longer use it to play tracks in the background unless you PAY!
This is really shite and cripples the functionality. As for the design... Bright and nasty springs to mind.
Spotify is awesome. It can replace Google Play music completely at all. And it is easy to download Spotify songs and playlists by using AudKit Spotify Music Downloader. The downloaded Spotify songs are playable offline with no ads inside, more importantly, no need to use Spotify Premium. It is amazing.
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