I’m cleaning out my gmail folders this weekend, and went deep into the archive to 2011, when I got my invite to Google Music.
It’s funny, because I just (November) moved all of my music out of cloud and back to local-only. Amazon was the last straw, when I tried to play purchased music, and was forced to listen to it on shuffle with other songs not of my choosing.
Anyway… there was a time when Google (ahem, Youtube) Music was set to be a game-changer. Imagine if enshittification wasn’t a thing.
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Yes I too am “buying” music and adding it to my Emby and Music Assistant servers.
Why emby over jf?
I have had Emby forever. Love it for videos, but it’s absolutely garbage for music. It’s just not built to support music, so it’s clunky and slow. I never used plex or jelly, but both built stand-alone music apps to address this exact problem, so I would assume they are both better. Emby was asked to build one, but they basically said no and also not anytime soon if they ever do decide to. They really didn’t seem to get what was so bad with what they already offered.
There are standalone music apps for emby though, I use symfonium on android which is simply awesome. It’s not that expensive either.
There is no official standalone music app for jellyfin. The regular apps do great with music though
Not sure; I’ve been using Plex for music. The app (and added features) are very nice to have (and don’t exist in Jellyfin).
I run a JF server as well as Plex to see where they are (from time to time) with their music app and it doesn’t have nearly the features PlexAmp has.
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Not Foss though?
Metro is pretty good, especially if you liked google music
Why not use Navidrome. It supports the SubSonic API so there’s a wider array of clients you can use, and it has a pretty good web UI.
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Those are just players, right? Navidrome is also a subsonic server. Do you use something else?
I use Navidrome with Symfonium, love it! Thanks for letting me know about Tauon. I use Supersonic but Tauon seems will also fit my needs, don’t know why I hadn’t seen it before
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(Oh yeah missed that, thanks!)
+1 for Navidrome. I switched over to it over a year ago and it provides everything I had with subsonic before subsonic crashed hard one day and I decided to find a more up to date application. I pair it with the android app Symfonium and I feel like I am using a high end streaming service.
I was a day one GPM music user until it was discontinued. That app was my most used service ever and it took thousands of hours to curate my whole collection there. When Google killed it, I vowed to never become dependent on a Google product much less a cloud based service ever again. PlexAmp is my go to now.
Yes Plexamp gang! I find the transition works for me too. I have a raspberry pi that just works with all my music on there. Paid the lifetime Plex fee too because I use it constantly.
Absolutely, the lifetime was worth it!
PlexAmp member reporting in.
I’m that regard, Google does a lot to propagate the use of free software and self hosting.
I really liked them at one time.
Let’s all of us stop making the mistake of trusting big tech. They always make a good product you actually want then rugpull once you’re settled. YouTube music is passably okay but there’s a dozen bugs and issues that I’m still struggling with that didn’t exist in Google music
The UI/UX is absolute trash for uploaded music compared to play music.
The algorithms are worse too
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They decided which one is better for them.
Honest question as someone who didn’t get the chance to use Google Music and now uses YouTube Music: what are the downsides of YTM? What was Google Music better at?
I can’t speak specifically to YouTube Music. But Google Music allowed you to upload I think it was 50,000 of your own songs. And at the time it supported really good audio quality.
The app was also simple and clean. I don’t remember seeing all kinds of ads or suggestions for featured artists, podcasts, etc. Spotify seems a lot busier than what I remember with Google Music. That being said I mostly used Google Music to stream my personal library.
I’ll die on the hill that GPM was and still is the best music service I ever used. I don’t think I ever had a single recommendation that wasn’t on point for me. The service worked flawless and the app was easy to use. When we got the notice our hearts sank. Spotify doesn’t even compare .
Good call, recommendations have only gotten worse with subsequent iterations. I am glad they added gapless playback though, the first few versions had a tiny pause between songs which was hella obvious on stuff like Pink Floyd.
Same! I still keep the icon on my phone to remind me of what we lost.
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Does anyone else remember when Gmail was invite only and you only got like 10 invites?
It’s how I snagged a “firstname.lastname” address. No numbers or anything! All the other people with my exact name out there can fuck off!
And as a bonus you snagged firstnamelastname without realising.
This alone makes Gmail a better service than most providers. All of the similar but different address confusions avoided.
It really should be standard practice.
Oh I know.
There’s someone with a variation of my first name (think “Steven” versus “Steve”) who absolutely cannot get their shit sorted and gives out my address as theirs all over the place using “longerFirstNameLastname” but fucks it up and uses my address instead. I tried emailing them directly once letting them know, got accused of “hacking their google” and now I just delete some important looking emails like travel reservations and digital gift card redemption things for Xbox.
Yeah I snagged one too; but all the people with that name seem to have made variations of it, and when they give it out, either they forget their own email address or the person they give it to just mishears and simplifies to first name.lastname. Needless to say I receive a lot of junk intended for other people.
A buddy has guy123 and has had it for decades. It’s commonly used for fluff email entries and he enjoys seeing the spam people are up to lol.
I have a first and last name email on Gmail and I had some dbag email me telling me if I didn’t hand over the email to him he was going to sign my account up for every spam service he could find also claimed he was going to hack my account but the brute force attempts and phishing emails didn’t work. This was a few years ago and I still get a ton of spam on that account and Google doesn’t have a solution for it so the account just sits there unused. I will take that email to my grave before I let some jackass in the internet get what he wants.
Remember when the Intenet made you optimistic? That’s why I think these posts gut me so much. Because it doesn’t do that anymore.
Anyway off to continue doom scrolling.
“The internet will bring us all together! It will democratize truth and information!” Was the manta of the 2000s.
20 years later and the exact opposite happened.
to be fair i would say that the internet largely has made information significantly more democratic & accessible. truth, not so much…
although i definitely do count the fact that you need to know how to spot & deal with misinformation and especially disinformation and differentiate it from valid information in order to safely use the internet, as a very big accessibility problem currently. Most people aren’t growing up learning that on their own, and it’s certainly not well taught.
Ah yes, Google Music was nice.
I’m so happy to still have my trusty iPod Classic 128Gb. I have a little Bluetooth dongle for its headphone jack (remember those?) that pairs with my hearing aids. All my tunes and podcasts in my pocket, no phone signal required.
Recently I downloaded iTunes again because I’m trying to consolidate my music library/listening history from all my old services and get them on Jellyfin.
And…I’d honestly forgotten how legitimately good a piece of software iTunes is. Not perfect, obviously, but I’d forgotten what it was like to have sophisticated music management tools. Just the sheer amount of options and tools to sort and manage the list, to be able to edit the properties, etc.
Then you look at modern streaming apps and it’s all just…terrible. The user is completely neutered. You can’t do even half as much with them. Things are just straight up hidden or don’t exist anymore, you have very few methods of controlling how things are organized or sorted, etc.
“Modern” design principles seem to be “you can just deal with using the app the way we think you should, we won’t give you the ability to make it your own”.
That’s what made Google Play Music so good: it was that beautiful sweet spot between the useful tool of iTunes-esc music management and the convenience of the streaming services. I didn’t feel like my hands were tied when using it like I do with Spotify.
I only tried Spotify once. I read a reference to a song I wanted to listen to but didn’t own. Searched for it on Spotify, found it, and clicked to play it. It played something else entirely, not even by the same artist. I tried a few times, but it wouldn’t play that song or anything by that artist. I guess I just don’t understand Spotify?
Spicetify helps ease the pain a little bit
terrible. I thought I would never need a copy of my music files again - They’re uploaded to Google so it’s all good.
When it crashed, it was an extreme hassle to download the several gigs, I ended up storing them on a phone temporarily, which then died and is likely not recoverable. I lost some rare and unique recordings like the music from my old band that I recorded.
Maintaining this would have been a pittance for Google.
EDIT: See replies below for the solution. Thanks Lemmy!
I thought all Google Music was transferred to YouTube Music. You might still have those files in your library.
Thanks! it turns out that it is all there!
I never bothered to setup a YT Music account, so I never realized that the uploaded music was still available. I know this is a very niche problem, but just in case anyone is searching and comes across this:
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Yes, Google Music uploads are saved in your YouTube Music files. You already have a Google account, so you can set it up with the same login to gain access to the files.
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On desktop, open “Library” on the left -> select “Uploads” tab at the top.
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Sort by “Album,” “Artist,” or “Song” to see the entire library.
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When searching, etc., it will default back to the YT Music streaming service. Manually select the “Uploads” tab after each operation.
It is also possible to download your music library (although not individual songs, etc.) from YT Music, although it is not obvious.
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Navigate to https://takeout.google.com/ while logged into the same Google account.
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Click on “Deselect all” (unless you wish to download ALL of your google related data.
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Select “YouTube and YouTube Music” at the bottom of the list
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Click “All YouTube data included,” then select “music-uploads” as well as “music-library-songs” (if you have any music acquired through Google)
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Follow the prompts to receive your files. You can choose to repeat this process as a periodic backup, or a one time download as a .zip (or set of .zip files). You can download them to your PC via email link, or you can have them directly transferred to another cloud service (Box, Dropbox, Google Drive, and OneDrive as of now)
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This process can take a while, but in my case I received the download links within a couple minutes (about 30 GB).
Good luck, and enjoy!
Here is an alternative Piped link(s):
Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.
I’m open-source; check me out at GitHub.
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Man GPM was the jam… found so many new artists with that service. I was an early adopter and gladly paid my monthly fee.
And then YouTube music happened… the bastards.
I rolled my own Plex server and am on plexamp for music now.
I’ll never go back to streaming.
25K tracks on my Plex server, and Plexamp is the best music player I’ve ever used. Having started with WinAmp, I’ve been through quite a few.
GPM was my jam. It had simple features that I would later take for granted, like remembering the exact track I left off on, and the number of times I’ve played a particular track. I only keep YTM because it comes with premium (no ads on YT). The second they separate premium from YTM, I’ll drop it.
I used Google Play Music for purchases/online music locker and loved it. I eventually became that idiot that never downloaded all their purchases before the switch to Youtube Music happened.
Now I can’t even open Youtube Music because it loads up my GPM library and rubs in my face that I essentially paid to have a bunch of music pre-listed for streaming that now has unskippable ads that I can’t listen to unless I leave my screen on and unlocked.
I was too broke and slammed to get a new external drive in order to get all my music downloaded and saved from GPM at the time of the switch, but I look back on it and think about how I could’ve skipped meals and stuff to have gotten something with just enough space to save that music.
Your music is likely still there if you grab it with Takeout. Mine was. The only problem: one flat folder. I spent weeks with Picard working out which tracks where what by title and acoustic ID. So, not great, but I got back my own music files for some things I’d forgotten completely.
I just did it and it worked! It’s definitely a jumble of music files but it’s all there, every last bit. Thank you, thank you so much. This has been weighing on my mind for so long, there are so many songs I can put back on my offline playlists now that I have them again. You’re the best!
Aw, man! That’s great that you’re back in business! I’m chuffed that you get to go down memory lane like this now. Music=culture=who we are and shouldn’t be controlled like in the digital age bastardization of copyright.
When google music was consolidated into YouTube music it was a slightly worse experience, but mostly it somehow just ruined all of my playlists and made them unusable both on music and YouTube.
Slightly? I hated it and switched to Spotify
Me too. I would’ve probably used Google Play Music to the end of my days but the transition to Youtube Music was so good awful I cancelled and switched to Spotify within a couple of days.
I couldn’t justify the cost of Spotify when I’m still paying for YouTube premium (and have no plans to quit) and at the end of the day it still isn’t GPM
From what I can tell, the core issue with YouTube music is that it is restricted to the same API end points as default YouTube. Their api for playlist management just sucks and a lot of client side caching and workarounds are required to make it at all feel okay to use.
True random is hidden. They auto play videos and/or rape my data with downloads when I specifically tell it not to.
It was the best! GPM’s demise was an abomination.
Yup, it was one of the worst “someone’s getting promo and the users are getting screwed” Google decisions.
Anyone remember this list?
https://www.reddit.com/r/googleplaymusic/comments/icmwdf/one_comprehensive_list_of_youtube_music/
