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.
I would give anything to get back the I’m Feeling Lucky button for music. It generated so many fantastic spontaneous playlists.
Yt music does the same thing though, I still send my downloaded songs to it, I really don’t get what was so special about the old version.
The previous version was a music management and playback platform that had a store and subscription available. The current version is a subscription-selling platform with rudimentary music management and playback features. You can no longer buy an album, only subscribe. God help you if you want to do anything with playlists.
Also it uses YouTube’s algorithm to do random play based on a song. It sucks so bad it’s not even funny. With repeated songs and songs that have nothing to do with the song you started with. And if one of the songs in the list is sorta popular it’s just stuck in a loop of the most dreadful popsongs.
Not to mention wanting to play videos the whole time, where I only want to listen to music as implied by the name YouTube Music. And it mixes your video history on YouTube with the music history, so randomly it will start suggesting songs when you want to watch video.
It’s like someone at YouTube decided that watching videos and listening to music is basically the same thing or close enough. It’s utterly moronic.
I remember.
Too soon, man, too soon.
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?
It was the best music service there was imo.
Now it’s buying my music and Jellyfinning it up.
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 is no official standalone music app for jellyfin. The regular apps do great with music though
There are standalone music apps for emby though, I use symfonium on android which is simply awesome. It’s not that expensive either.
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.
+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.
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
Yeah. I use use Jellyfin. Symfonium is the best player I’ve found and it supports most everything.
Tauon is a weird one, but it’s great with Jellyfin. Play counts are a little wonky at times though.
(My response was my in reaction to them asking why I’m using Jellyfin when there’s no need to change as I already have good players that support it.)
(Oh yeah missed that, thanks!)
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.
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.
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
It was amazing.
Fuck YouTube music. It fucking sucks. Someone needs to remind Google that when you replace something with something else, it’s supposed to be better, not worse.
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 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.
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!
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.
A good alternative for people who still like streaming music. I highly recommend the testimonials section https://nuclear.js.org/
I like the testimonials
I especially like the last one.
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!
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.
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.
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.
I was a big fan of GrooveShark. I thought they could have transitioned to the paid system, but weren’t able to.
