They've had years to fix all the issues people have had with this - and yet everyone still hates it (based on Reddit / App reviews). Playing music offline is broken, browsing playlists is insanely slow, and it lacks so many basic features of GPM/other services (like actual random shuffle and not a smart radio that plays the same 10 songs). Combining Youtube Likes with the music thumbs up makes no sense - I now have lecture videos that randomly play while trying to shuffle my library (that I guess Youtube somehow mistook as music). Even how it integrates with Google Assistant is terrible compared to the old product.
I understand why the switch to the new service was needed, from a license/business perspective. But no idea why they can't just listen to their users and at least match feature-wise the product it's supposed to replace.
I've lost faith in Google's ability to produce software and not just endlessly rebrand things.
I haven’t heard a single consumer express enthusiasm for the switch to YouTube music. Anyone I’ve casually talked to about it is dismissive and doesn’t really understand what it's even trying to be. If anybody has heard anything from a user's perspective that is in favor of this, I would love to hear that argument. Otherwise I can only assume that this was a typical Google move where product people internally pushed for a rebrand to advance their own careers, at the expense of the user experience.
YouTube Music has the one feature I care about: A catalogue that includes everything from well-known music from top artists, to the random indie music that got a grand total of 10,000 views on YouTube when it was published 8 years ago.
Sure I could download these songs (assuming RIAA takes its teeth out of youtube-dl) and upload them to most music players, but YouTube Music facilitates discovery and does all the work for me.
Too bad it has worse playlist management than freaking Windows Media Player from 2004. Seriously, I can't fucking find my playlists. I can't organize them. I can't search for them. I can't even easily create new ones by dragging multiple songs into them. And the icing on the cake is they get polluted with my decade old playlists from YouTube.
I absolutely detest YouTube music. It's only redeeming feature is a halfway decent radio and it's library ripped from YouTube proper. Everything else about is a worse user experience by almost every metric.
Yea, as someone who listens to Nightcore/Japanese music, Youtube Music is by far the easiest way to listen and discover music. And the download offline feature has always worked great for me, a 100 songs uploads periodically to match what I've been listening to, so I don't run into the classic issue of using the same "I don't have service" music playlist.
Not that I don't get why people complain about the move (it is a dramatically different app), but Google is the only one with the actual usage numbers, and honestly I've never met someone who has used it. I'm guessing they weren't the best, while Youtube has some of the best usage numbers of any Western service.
It's great right now for you. You don't worry about Google deciding to go about things totally differently in 18 months and shut it down? I don't pay for Google products because they have a shorter shelf-life than a bottle of ketchup.
I was excited about the catalog until I tried to add Electric Lady Land, and they didnt have a legit version, just a fan made amalgamation of differntly mastered singles from the album. Honestly disappointing.
I was a longtime Google Play Music All Access subscriber. One HUGE benefit that YouTube Music has is the available catalog. I like a lot of obscure music and remixes that no one else but YouTube has. I also agree that it's ridiculous that YouTube Music doesn't have all the features of Google Play Music. Still this was handled much better than most shutdowns where there is no migration path. I'm glad that Google is combining some redundant services. 5 more years and they might get their chat situation in order.
The switch to YouTube music was the last in a long chain of disappointments from Google, so two weeks ago I switched back to iPhone after 8 years of Android. I really, really wanted to like Android.
The story I’ve heard is that way more people are using YouTube for music listening than ever used Play Music, and that didn’t seem to be changing any time soon, so it doesn’t make sense to put any more resources toward Play Music.
> Combining Youtube Likes with the music thumbs up makes no sense - I now have lecture videos that randomly play while trying to shuffle my library
If there was a way to say "no, this isn't music", this would be easily solved. But Google's fascination with "AI-only" solutions won't let that happen. (You'd think someone would be happy to have an extra source of training data!)
There definitely doesn't seem to be a vision anymore - just product managers rebranding things for promotions. Pointless features like Soli are added to the Pixel then dropped next generation.
With any new market they are just failing completely - unable to make a smartwatch/VR/AR platform. DayDream VR / ARCore / WearOS are all now just examples of them just throwing stuff out there with no long term commitment
This is so unforgivable. A playlist can be what? A hundred songs? A thousand? Ten thousand? This is a few kilobytes of data at most. Something has gone seriously wrong if the Google infrastructure and a mobile device with > 1gb of RAM cannot manipulate this small amount of data properly.
I think you're a few orders of magnitude off. If each song has 100 bytes of metadata, which is a reasonable guess I think, then ten thousand songs costs a megabyte.
I mean, your point still stands, but it's more effectively made without the exaggeration I think.
And FWIW, the migration doesn't work. The "thumbs up" playlist goes into YT Music "Liked music" which includes all sorts of other YouTube "music-ish" videos that we have liked over the years and the order is all jacked up, plus mixed with all that other stuff.
So your "Liked Music" is now, not what you intended. The migration was super botched by the product team because of this.
To every Google employee reading this: your company sucks. Tell that to your manager.
With the exception of Youtube, I will never use Google entertainment products again. No Stadia, no Google Play Movies. I don't know what their vision is for product, but whatever it is subtracts from the world. I was worried a decade ago when I saw music moving into the cloud. Now my fears are confirmed. Google never intended to be a good custodian.
Google shits whatever goodwill it establishes right down the toilet. They do it at every turn.
Before Google's music subscription product, I bought a lot of music on the service. And now they're deleting it all. All of my playlists and listening history is disappearing. That's not a good feeling.
Screw you, Google.
After the DOJ takes your illegal money printing machine away, you won't have customers left to go chasing after.
There’s a damn good chance that lots of people up the chain secretly think that too, but they don’t see any alternative to just putting one foot in front of the other.
I lived through OnLive -- from beta to shutdown -- and that is exactly why I'm putting zero money into these cloud-only game licenses, unless it's a Netflix-style subscription. When the time comes for shutdown, they won't do the courtesy of granting one free license for that game on another platform, e.g.: Steam, Xbox Live, PSN. The purchases will just be gone and people will point at the ToS.
The only way IMO is GeForce Now-style services, where your existing digital library is honored. That or Netflix-style subscriptions like Game Pass Ultimate.
I realize we're talking about music and google here, but i'm curious how people feel about Audible and Kindle? I made a fairly large bet on Audble+Kindle because we ran out of space in our home for books (as well as the portability.) Our entire library is now on Kindle with elaborate notes -- how big a risk do you think this is?
(to compare risks, btw, in the past my past home got majorly flooded (Hurricane Sandy) and we also lost all our books+music cassettes in 1992 during the Nor'Easter...so it isnt like any option is w/o risks though of course there are levels of risk and levels of damage)
At least with Kindle books, you can run them through DeDRM and back up the DRM-free files. With Audible audiobooks, I’m not aware of a method other than to play them back and record the audio in real time.
OpenAudible works to remove the DRM on Audible books. Worst case, grab the CD versions from your library and rip them yourself.
It’s a shame about the notes on Kindle, I don’t think those are something you can back up / transfer. Really makes me wish that the open source alternatives had the same level of polish and feature set.
Good point, though with the YouTube-dl DMCA takedown recently (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24872911), I wouldnt be surprised if DeDRM type utilities also get taken down soon.
Kindle and even PC downloadable games fall into the same category. You stand to lose your license to access if the service shuts down but at least you have binaries or files that could be reversed. It’s becoming harder though, considering how much effort RDR2 took to crack.
I (mostly) only buy DRM free books,and I'm happily reading them on my ancient Sony reader which has neither a touchscreen nor wifi. Baen has a fantastic collection of DRM free content you can buy directly from them. All the Tor books are available from your favorite bookseller without DRM.
I use a Kindle, but always buy books from sources that also offer epub and PDF in addition to Kindle formats, unless the only digital alternative is on Amazon as some editors are very keen on Kindle DRM.
For my eyes e-ink devices are the best to read on, just like paper.
The thing is: this isn’t even a fringe viewpoint. It’s pretty obvious that people are avoiding it at least in part because it’s from Google, and Google are never in it for the long haul.
They’re already getting proved right, as well, Stadia’s getting barely any updates or new games, no exclusives worth the candle. It’s really just a matter of time.
I am for now. There was the upfront controller investment as I already had the Chromecasts. For the most part I just play the free games on offer because of the fear of throwing money down a hole.
"I don't know what their vision is for product" Unless it pipes ads at you, after collecting as much telemetry as possible, they don't have one either.
Ok then that's much better than I expected it to be. Other services that act primarily as digital shops get a lot of praise overall( qobuz bandcamp) so I'm not sure about the situation here.
> I honestly don't know why Google's Product Team has any positive reputation at this point.
They have a positive reputation?
I've been a loyal Googler for about 20 years. Nexus, Pixel, Chromecasts, GMail, Fi, Android TV, Google Domains...
I'm about done. It seems like every month they do something to make it more apparent that they're just an advertising company. Products fail to get maintained, they get upgrades that make them less useful, or they're outright cancelled.
I'm planning on de-Googling a bit soon. I may stick with Android, although iPhones or FOSS options are tempting. I feel like I can't stomach supporting Google when they continue to make misstep after misstep.
> I've been a loyal Googler for about 20 years. Nexus, Pixel, Chromecasts, GMail, Fi, Android TV, Google Domains...
It was the same for me. But when Google seriously started botching the Nexus line and I bought three almost unusable products in a row (Nexus 9, Nexus Player, Nexus 5X), I was fed up and left.
Photos continues changing interface every few months, every time without any clear reason or logic. The underlying product is solid, but photos(and other Google products) definitely feel like they have some very expensive designers who continuously have to justify their own existence by changing the interface over and over and over again, without any reason to keep changing it other than securing their own jobs.
The lock-in with Photos they've slowly moved in is phenomenal. The exporting of originals is always somehow difficult due to random bugs. Lately I've had to resort to Takeout with some relatives to migrate them to Dropbox where they're not locked in, and about 20% of the photos don't contain any exported metadata. It's ridiculous since Google Photos shows those same pictures clearly on the timeline, indicating it does know when they were take, it just excludes that information from the Takeout.
For me it seems more or less (mostly less?) than iPhoto though I'm not really an iPhoto user.
What I find frustrating is I'd like to name people (as in face recognition) but the UI for doing so is horrible. Instead of being optimized to let me tag 50 to 100 people it's design to do one person at a time in a tedious way where you pick one face from the list of faces which takes to another screen where you edit the name, then going to back to the list you've lost your place.
Further, there is no way to sort or set a priority on people so for example 8 of the top 20 people it shows are people I haven't interacted with in 10 to 15 years. I'd much rather it show people who are part of my life. Further, one of those 8 is an x. I have no ill will toward them but I don't really want them at the top of the list. And, there's no rhyme or reason who's on that top list. it's not a list by number of photos or most recent or anything that I can figure out.
Why is this important? Because if I can tag my photos I can search for photos of people. But since they make it hard to use it's like they don't want it to be used.
not OP, but for me the killer feature of photos is having a phone gallery that syncs with the cloud and is easy to browse in my phone and my pc. My phone breaking or being lost is way less of a worry now since I don't have to worry about backups, and I can take a picture and have it available in my pc instantly.
iPhoto is mostly the same but it's too tied to the os, which is a problem if I want to move to android for a while or need a photo in my work laptop that isn't tied to my apple account.
I'm having a very hard time deciding what my next phone will be. I'd like to move away from Android because it's basically an advertising machine, and iOS certainly seems to be the more privacy focused... But I also won't be able to run "real" firefox with an ad blocker like I can on Android...
Use PiHole on a Raspberry Pi or set your DNS to use servers that block ads via DNS.
I did the latter six months ago. One time I've had to show my college freshman how to change the DNS on her MacBook from the router default settings to Google or Cloudflare because the software her class was using wouldn't work otherwise.
We do have a Roku and I get tempted to set up 2 Raspberry Pis for PiHole. I did set up one, then had some issues because the router wants 2 DNS hosts. But it looks like a lot of time and switching DNS was so easy.
I have PiHole set up, and it's great. I do need to figure out a way to VPN to my pihole while I'm out and about.
I also am using cloudflared so my upstream provider is CIRA's excellent Canadian Shield DNS provider and all the clients in the house end up going over DNS-over-HTTPS.
If you upgrade your router to something like FreshTomato or DD-WRT, you have a lot more control over what DNS servers you advertise to clients on the network.
I'm in a similar boat. I'm not planning on getting the new Pixel though (the Pixel 5 is badly conceived), and too many bad experiences with Samsung mean I'm considering moving to iPhone.
Even if Google kills the Domains product, migrating to a different domain registrar is easy, and even Google wouldn’t kill the service off without offering a long time to migrate.
Regardless of price, I would never tie my domains to any Google account that has anything else in it. If it ever gets suspended by a rogue algorithm you might've just lost your domains unless you backed up your transfer keys and took a bunch of other precautions.
GPM was my first streaming music service. I subscribed when it was still $7.99. It didn’t get too many updates, but it worked fine for years. Then they started pushing me to YT Music, which IMO is garbage.
I’m happy I realized where they were headed and switched to Apple Music awhile back.
Google Colab has a very very strong Engineering team. Part of Google Research they definetly changed the game when they offer a free product which 1) increased collaboration across ML research 2) offer everybody access to GPUs first K80 and now T4 which is great among researchers and students. Now many other notebooks products now want to be the Enterprise colab version
Very good question. They target different audience,
Google has many notebooks solutions: colab (free) colab enterprise (monthly) kaggle, ai platform notebooks and datalab. Colab is targeted to students/researchers which are just experimenting, as there is no guarantee that kernel will run more than 24hrs. The paid version removes this restriction. AI notebooks is targeted for enterprise data scientists (Jupyterlab) which require patches/VPC-SC/IAM integration, security, etc. Datalab is the very first version of the notebooks and that's going away. Kaggle is mainly for competitions. In the end Google will have only 2 Notebooks colab and AIP notebooks
I dunno, I believe Microsoft's Azure Notebooks predates Colab and perhaps gave Google the kick to make it public, and Colab was a spinout of an internal tool with a rather rocky relationship with open source that has still been a pain point I run into using it for teaching ("what is the difference between Colab and Jupyter?" is a question without an especially clear answer). Also they stole the name from GE's old internal social network.
That latter one, at least, was not entirely serious criticism.
I'm not sure that even Colab is an unmitigated win for the company, it does definitely have "that AWS feeling" of an internal tool that was made a product without really retooling it for that purpose thoroughly. This has kind of become the norm in cloud platforms, though.
I had the same error with contacts on Google Contacts disappearing repeatedly when I changed phones and tried to re-sync. Contact information is so important in business that once you lose it you dump the product forever. Google Contacts immediately stopped being my Master Copy, though I use it as a convenience.
I really wish I could set my own permissions, it seemed like it had some multi-master bug.
I have videos of recipes and comic shows in my Liked Music. You would think youtube Google had better AI to detect this kind of stuff. Makes think many of the videos being wrongly censored/demonetized on youtube may really be because of faulty AI detection of the content. I do enjoy the fact that I can get all those live video music available on Youtube and not on any other platform.
Yes, good point. But I don't see mixing recipes video in your music as something optimized for revenue as I don't see any ads but maybe it pumps the views of these recipes or something.
I'm curious to know what you think should happen to those. They are songs after all, and some people liked them because they actually do like them as songs, so how would Google determine what reason you liked them for?
Are you suggesting Google shouldn't bring likes for certain songs over to YT music because you liked them 'as memes' rather than as music?
Just let the Google Music import create a separate playlist called "Google Music Favourites". that took me 2 seconds of thinking, surely the overpaid 'talent' at Google can come up with a better idea that their current 'fix'?
I don't want the option to completely separate my YTM likes from Youtube likes. I would much rather have to re-like a song again on YTM than have random videos show up on YTM. I don't want any of my Youtube content to be transfered.
If you think of it, before when I was on GPM, I didn't have any of my Youtube content and I was perfectly fine. So I'm not sure why I need any of it now.
Ugh. Unlike some others, my 'migration' worked, but YT Music sucks. Sorry to be blunt and short, but that's how I best describe it. It's in every way worse than GPM for my use. I legally buy songs, and just want to stream them. YT Music is obsessed with, after playing an upload, playing random music with ads in it, rather than say, playing the next upload. The only thing that works without much complaints is a playlist, so that's good I guess. I can't even figure out if/how I can purchase music from it, which is really annoying.
Apple Music comes with iTunes Match [1], which allows upload of up to 100k songs.
It's a little wonky for edits of songs that are already available in the Apple Music library — because it would try to deduplicate instead of upload — but it's still good enough for my use.
Google is out of the music purchase business, they no longer have licensing for that. That feature is fully gone.
Out of curiosity, are you a premium member or are you using YTM at free tier? I find the free tier version is much more handicapped compared to GPM, but arguably GPM was very generous comparative to the competition.
Free tier. I have zero interest in music 'discovery' which is essentially what people want money for. I just want to have a place to buy and stream my own music, anywhere.
I am a long time google music customer as well and having a hard time enjoying youtube music.
I'm kinda converting to other things with ads to find new music then I just buy the albums and host them on plex. Works like google music did, has android auto, sonos integrations, works from a browser, all the things. Except now I can keep everything in flac, stream on the LAN in lossless, and transcode to whatever while I'm away from home.
The most annoying part is I've had to start buying CDs again for obscure stuff that I can't find online in a lossless format. But they're easy enough to rip and throw in the music folder for plex.
How is it that Google create/rebrand/close so many music and chat services over the years. While Apple have a single message service (iMessage) and a single music service (Apple Music) that have been consistently branded with constant growth and show no signs of being shut down?
As a consumer I have no idea what’s going on with some areas of Google’s products. It’s a major turn off.
Agreed that it is annoying, but its interesting to look back at how we got here. Google Play Music (GPM) launched in 2011. To get music on here, I'm guessing that team had to sign contracts with the various publishers and record studios. The onboarding and licensing terms of those were likely entirely around this music streaming service.
Then you have Youtube. It's been a video hub for anything, and other those 9 years since GPM launched, it has become a place where lots of people listen to music (watching music videos or the like). You have companies like Vevo that publish music content there. I'd guess Youtube has different contracts with those companies that have evolved over time about how music can be played.
So over these past 9 years, 2 products that had little overlap, have started to overlap more and more. As youtube expanded, it started butting into GPM's world. That likely was odd for Google for contracts and licensing of that content. Youtube Music (YTM) likely allows them to do it all under one silo now. Plus, YTM lets you do background music or videos, which is not something you could ever really do with GPM.
> but its interesting to look back at how we got here.
Oh, please, I worked at Google as well, and this is typical Google’s inability to have attention span and coherent leadership for anything longer than 6 months. One VP did one thing, then another one another, then it turned out that it’s stupid and inconsistent. As. with. any. other. non-core product! Basically Google’s top leadership doesn’t care enough to impose coherent strategy across different divisions, and thing like this happen all the time (Android/Chrome OS, Chat/GVC/Hangouts/Allo/Duo/RCS/Meet, Gmail/Inbox, Nest/Google Home, and so on).
Contracts seem like a very weird motivation for this. Why completely overhaul the user experience by getting rid of an entire application for consuming music and trying to shoehorn it into another, instead of just keeping two separate entities with separate licenses?
Even if the motivation makes some sense, the user experience is worse and I have very little faith that Google will maintain YTM long enough that I should invest in using it. The way Google does things means that in five years it will probably be on its way out in favor of the next rebrand that will get some product manager a promotion. Spotify, meanwhile, is still kicking after 10 or so years with no signs of slowing down or forcing users into a completely different app. i’ll stick with that, personally.
>Plus, YTM lets you do background music or videos, which is not something you could ever really do with GPM
It doesn't. It forces you to watch videos (if you're steaming to your home stereo or other casting enabled device) and prioritizes the video versions of everything, even if the video isn't officially from the artist and us just some random person's resubmission.
The user experience is almost impossibly terrible. It seems like the kind of curated experience one would concoct if they were trying to prank someone with an intentionally frustratingly hostile UX.
I have the opposite frustration here, where I queue up some music videos on my TV and inevitably after 1-2 songs, I'm staring at static album covers when I know there's an awesome music video that should be playing instead
I'm not sure why the licensing would impact the app in any way. They could swap the backend, keeping the better app. The background video is just one feature to add compared to trying to fix the YTM many problems.
Point taken. Maybe this was just one of many factors? I could also see that Google had products that were overlapping (Youtube and GPM), and they decided to merge them, and this is the way they did it?
I definitely had friends that used Youtube as a poor-mans spotify and would just keep the videos playing in the background on their desktop.
> I could also see that Google had products that were overlapping (Youtube and GPM), and they decided to merge them, and this is the way they did it?
If it's the way they did, it was one of the worst ways anyone could think of. It baffled me how so many smart minds can work at Google and take so many terrible decisions at the same time.
This was just one in several equally stupid decisions they did. They could have dominated the messaging market by now, but they threw out that chance several times.
Sometimes I think it might have been on purpose. Maybe they are afraid to dominate too many markets at the same time and avoid a anti trust lawsuit? Because otherwise it literally makes no sense. Either this or they need to feed their stupid hierarchical loop giving senseless promotions to whoever creates a new thing that nobody asked for by destroying another thing that people were starting to use and like.
I just read that YTM has only 256 bit AAC just like YouTube. Going down in audio quality is a step in the wrong direction. There's just no point in installing 5G in so many countries when the encoding bit rates are going down for services.
Non audiophiles don't require more than 256kbps which is about the highest you can do for AAC anyway. Sure 320kbps can on some occasions be better on consumer hardware but I am not sure most will notice a difference.
So maybe 320kbps but I am really skeptical of people who need more.
Obviously there is a lot more to digital audio than bitrate.
Pretty sure I remember Hydrogen Audio did a bunch of ABX tests that showed nobody (including so-called "golder ears") could distinguish 160kbps (or maybe it was 192) VBR MP3 from uncompressed - assuming a good encoder was used.
I’m absolutely not an audiophile and I don’t know what Spotify does, but their audio quality has gone down the drain of late. I suspect streaming services are all trying hard to reduce costs by converging towards quality levels similar to what we had with FM radio and early MP3s, i.e. pretty shit overall but good enough to feel that pop/dance “phat bass”.
I assume so. Spotify has a feature somewhat like this, but I keep it turned off because I find it annoying and distracting. It’s a bit silly to try to justify a huge move like this based on such a trivial feature, in my opinion.
I'm not sure I follow really. Any music player I've used plays in the background. I throw in some headphones and it plays without the screen being on. I'm not really sure how else it can go in the background but I know I'm missing something. lol
> Play videos on your mobile device while using other apps or when your screen is off. Background play is available on YouTube, YouTube Music, and YouTube Kids mobile apps (if these apps are available in your location).
They only allowed background play on Youtube with a subscription.
Hah, just like Porsche having an idea of more horsepower for a monthly fee (or pay per fun afternoon's drive) or Musk's self-driving subscription idea, now it's "Pay if you want to be able to browse Instagram while listening to music"/pay if you want to be able to turn your screen off.
Friend of mine who isn't me still downloads MP3s on torrents and has no cloud subscriptions. I'm sure he's smug about this.
I believe it's a subscription feature for YouTube Music as well. The link you provided indicates that this requires a YouTube Premium subscription, though a bit more digging on that page and https://support.google.com/youtubemusic/answer/6313552?hl=en suggests that the minimum required subscription is actually YouTube Music Premium (this is included as part of YouTube Premium).
I've often wondered about what percent of battery drain on smartphones is directly attributable to this business model choice and therefore exactly how many smartphones have ended up in landfills before they needed to because Google ultimately prioritizes a few dollars over the environment.
Apple has had iTunes, and for a time a music “social network” Ping. The original messaging tool was called iChat before it was iMessage. Apple has also had multiple Internet services that were more or less the same (iTools, .Mac, iCloud). Even Contacts used to be called Address Book, and Wallet used to be called Passbook.
Google still does worse but renaming things is pretty common.
That’s not quite right. Messages on iPhone was always messages. Mac’s version was called ichat and was separate. Apple then cancelled it and merged it into messages. Messages itself never had a name change and was always larger than ichat.
Likewise, the itunes music store still exists! It is a place where you can buy and download music. It’s not the same service as Apple Music, which is a streaming music service.
>Likewise, the itunes music store still exists! It is a place where you can buy and download music. It’s not the same service as Apple Music, which is a streaming music service.
That's actually an interesting point that I've never considered before, even though I was aware of it.
iTunes has always been kept separate from Apple Music, with no evident plans to merge those in sight, while Google Play Music was used for both streaming and purchasing music. I don't think it ultimately affected the demise of GPM, but it is still an interesting topic to ponder.
But as that article briefly mentions, the iTunes Store continues to exist and can be reached from the Apple Music app. I suspect this will change in a future macOS release, though I don't work for Apple and have no inside info.
I am a personal gsuite user, and migrated multiple companies to gsuite over 10 years now (?). That means I tried to force everyone on to hangouts / chat / meet / duo / allo / etc etc. It's not just a turn off in a personal space. It's at the point I have given up on trying to get folks to standardize on google's products.
Google just did a slack competitor, but to click the screen share button (very common in slack to want to talk and screen share to collab) you are forced over in to meet land, which forces you out of your chat and defaults to video (not wanted). It's just such a total mess its totally incredible.
Ha, I remember my days trying to get friends and family to use Google services only to have them shutdown. No more. I tell them to stay far, far away from anything Google.
> How is it that Google create/rebrand/close so many music and chat services over the years.
It's not a rebrand. It's a rewrite. People need them promos.
In many cases, however, rewrites are actually warranted. As underlying infra gets replaced it becomes very expensive to run and maintain legacy services.
Rewrites are warranted, but rebranded every time you rewrite is not. Being able to replace core components while keeping the same brand and feature set is what takes real effort. Throwing everything out and making a completely different app with is imo a bit lazy and bad for the user.
If you truly must change things, gradual piece by piece changes is far prefered than complete 100% replacements like GPM -> YTM.
If they had slowly migrated GPM behind the scene to use Youtube over the years, and then after 2-3 years, just changed the name, I'm sure users would've been far less alienated.
I don’t think Google set up a predictable product iteration unveiling structure. One day I expect to see the PlayStation 6 for example, and one day I expect to see an update to the MacBook, and so on.
One day, do I expect to see an unveiling of a new Gmail UI? None of it is predictable because it feels like they do some serious a/b tests and just silently roll stuff out. They lack a structured presentation timeline. Currently users have no predictable expectations.
When that’s the case, just rename stuff, rebrand stuff, get rid of stuff, who the fuck cares. We didn’t promise the user updates, or even iterations, we simply promised them a one time product.
That’s the only thing that I can think of behind all of this. The simpler answer could just be their product team is not the best of the best for a company that works pretty hard at getting the best.
Your two examples at the top are both hardware, those work very differently. Websites used to do massive updates, but many have learned that it just leads to a lot of angry users. Slowly updating one component at a time works much better in my experience, and it's far less change for the user to adapt to at once.
> As a consumer I have no idea what’s going on with some areas of Google’s products.
You are their product. They sell advertisers access to you. Everything else is a sideshow and they will eventually get bored with it and let it rot. Google has had a lot of good ideas over the years. They let devs create amazing things with the constant flow of ad dollars. But then those cool things don't make as much money as selling ads, and the devs want to move on to create a new thing, so the 300lb idiot baby that is Google wanders off and squats on something else.
I also have to wonder if Google is stuck in the doldrums of being a mid-life startup. Their initial team of rockstars have probably all retired to roll around in their millions. A whole new crop of money and status seeking folks have taken their place. Wall Street is expecting growth every quarter. There is constant pressure to refocus on revenue producers and grow the stock. They seem far detached from their initial roots under Sergey and Larry.
I have a Pixel phone and pay for Google Play Music since I have a large collection that I have uploaded. It's been extremely disappointing. I have tried switching to Youtube Music but the interface sucks. I'm tempted to switch over to the iPhone since I'm already unhappy with Google in other areas (showing news articles repeatedly for health issues that I searched for one time, not allowing me to turn off gmail for a Google account on Pixel, etc). Google has become extremely user-hostile of late.
In previous stories on here about Google's tendency to start stuff, shut it down arbitrarily, and compete with itself pointlessly, I recall seeing comments purporting to be from longtime Googlers saying that the reason this happens is at least in part due to Google's incentive structure. They reward people for creating "new" things, whether they're the same as something they've already got or not, and allocate very few resources for existing products that aren't already the company's bread and butter—getting put on something like Hangouts or Voice was considered to be almost a punishment detail, based on some of the comments I read, and could torpedo your chance at any kind of promotion.
What the person you’re replying to means, is that Apple Music was added on top of iTunes as a new service rather than iTunes being scrapped completely. If Google were to do the same thing, then google play music would still be around and not be getting killed in favor of youtube music.
That’s a fair point. Though in this case aren’t google play music and youtube music substantially similar services?
Google’s reputation is that they will have 2-3 services with the same functionality. Whereas there are pretty legitimate business reasons you want want to make a streaming business distinct from a legacy content purchasing business.
Also I just happened last week to rip in Apple Music some of my teenager years CD before packing and storing them.
This is still an option. Likewise the playlists I created on the go on my iPod Nano in a 2008ish trip reliably got migrated from versions to versions up until now.
So there's iTunes (2001-2019, but arguably renamed to Apple Music, so not actually dead), and Ping (2010-2012), the latter of which had approximately three users.
Like for like, Google Play Music (2011-2020) isn't quite as long-lasting, but more to the point, I'm not sure Apple has simultaneously maintained two competing services before ultimately canceling one.
Then the GP commenter mentioned "chat services," which makes the position unassailable. Google seems to have launched and folder a dozen or two chat services over time[1].
You can make and receive FaceTime calls from any recent Apple device to any recent Apple device (e.g. Mac to iPhone) which is nice, but FaceTime’s real advantage is call quality. It’s noticeably more clear and seems to handle poor/unstable connections much better.
I can FaceTime with people halfway around the world with more clarity than I can talk to someone on the same WiFi network using WhatsApp.
The blue and green chat bubbles are the sender’s chat bubbles, not the receiver’s. So it’s the iPhone user with the colored bubbles, non-iPhone receives and iPhone receivers are white/gray.
It has a couple of really good use cases as it works on non-phones (macs and ipads). Little kids and some older people don’t have phones. I like the bigger screen for non-casual video calls.
Also, I was on a project with a colleague who had a poor internet connection and we found FT worked better than zoom. FT video quality seems to be the best of the services I’ve used but personally I don’t care about this part much.
I wouldn’t call these “killer features” but they are enough, with the integration into address book etc, to make it flourish.
I'm autistic and have ADHD and music is my primary special interest. I have a large collection of rare and unique tracks, and I listen to music every day. I've been very satisfied with Google Play Music and now I'm having this utterly abysmal YT Music bs forced on me. It feels like a cruel joke.
I'm grateful for this thread because this move absolutely destroyed my last bit of good will towards Google. I'm incensed over it. The YT Music app is so much worse an experience, it is acutely evident users are not what Google has in mind with this app. Just embarrassingly bad, as has been noted by many others here.
For the users who stay using the undeniably worse app, Google will see more views for yt videos, upping their vanity metrics there. The addition of ads playing on music that I brought to the app in the base edition is awful, but good for the bottom line of the ads group.
Meanwhile, thanks to this horseshit, I am [finally] pulling my personal domain off of their G-suite, my next phone is going to be an iPhone [or a Librem], and I'm going to offer my services free to any of the clients I've put on to G-suite [several dozen over the years, regrettably] who want to egress somewhere safer.
Youtube is inescapable for video and I will likely always use it. But I'm going to stop paying for ad free and find other ways to get what I want from Google without giving them anything in return.
I'll also do everything in my power to try to make the ill will this has generated into a chorus.
> I have a large collection of rare and unique tracks, and I listen to music every day. I've been very satisfied with Google Play Music and now I'm having this utterly abysmal YT Music bs forced on me. It feels like a cruel joke.
I don't see how you're forced to use Youtube. I agree that using Youtube as your music library and management tool seems ridiculous. However why would anyone but casual listeners do so when there are plenty better alternatives? Just use one of the countless music players and library management tools much better suited to that task. Personally, I love Roon [1], but if you prefer something more affordable or free several other options come to mind:
- MusicBee
- Swinsian
- Foobar
or just plain old iTunes / Music.app
All of them are much better music players / collection organizers than Youtube.
Wow, reading all of these comments, it's really striking to me how Google has basically no consumer goodwill left. Obviously this is a biased sample, but it's kind of amazing to me how a company that was admired and beloved not too long ago is just reviled now: by governments, by their users, by their customers (i.e. advertisers).
I really have to wonder what morale is like in Google-land. So much of their corporate ethos was built on what great things they do for the world, and now with this constant drumbeat of basically everyone saying "we hate you, you suck, I can't wait until you get broken up" has to be weighing on employees.
And note this is not just a "people hate all big companies" thing. Sure, people have tons of gripes about Apple and Netflix for example but nowhere near the level of broken trust/expectations that has happened at Google.
Please don't mix loud yellers of HN with reality. If you look at any independent consumer reports the picture is very different. And
Yeah, there's plenty of people liking Google and even Facebook still.
Please never never mix up the sentiment of a site with a voting system (which while design will drown out certain ideas) with the general reality. This leads into very nasty surprises - both when releasing products in your company or when expecting election results. To be honest it's very bizzare that supposedly smart people on HN say dumb things like "who's still using Google products" and other silly sentiment in this very thread.
(Having said that, YTM is a pretty awful product which seems to be born from some very awful corporate decisionmaking. Everything YouTube is really.)
I mean, on one hand, sure, it's no surprise that your average person doesn't have as much hate toward Google as your average HNer. My point is Google used to be absolutely admired and beloved by the types of folks who frequent HN, and now, even if you don't look at them with distain, I think most HNers at least look at them with some sense of regret.
Internal resistance led to (allegedly) discontinuing that Chinese search surveillance engine (dragonfly was it?). Google employees care a lot more than typical ones it seems and we should give them more credit than “I hope your kidding”
> When you are getting money the amounts Google pays their employees, you couldn't care less if everyone in the world says "we hate you, you suck"
That kind of exquisitely proves my point. Back 15-20 years ago, the pitch was "if you're really smart and want to make gobs of money, but don't mind selling your soul, go to Wall Street. If you want to change the world (for the better) go to Silicon Valley."
Yes, of course that was always somewhat marketing speak, but it was also fairly representative of how people thought. This idea that people are just in it for the money, or just in it to "build your resume", are the kind of behaviors Googlers from an earlier era would have looked at with utter distain.
Last time I looked, their median retention for employees was painfully low, like 1.1 years low. So I doubt morale is good. But it doesn’t matter if you have buckets of cash to throw around, you can trivially replace burnt out engineers with new ones, since recruiting is made much easier with big numbers.
I know someone who couldn’t code a FizzBuzz who, through a couple of acquisitions, became a $500k+ middle manager at Google. I hope they saved money, because I don’t think anyone would possibly hire them post-Google lay-off. I wonder how many jabronies are farting around Google’s offices, reorganizing meetings and timelines all day and producing nothing of value.
I just removed my Google Home devices and migrated my music service to Tidal because of this whole YouTube Music debacle. Went like this:
1. Suddenly my Google Home would only use YouTube Music when playing to the Chromecast on my TV.
2. YouTube Music, among a bunch of other terrible UX issues around how it considers music to be organized/related, has the extremely annoying quality of always playing videos of the music instead of just the music.
3. Turns out there's an option in your account settings to tell it to only play audio, no videos.
4. Also, turns out this setting has zero effect when playing through a Chromecast, and thus the damnable videos persist.
5. So, I said, "Eff it!" and signed up for a Hi-Fi Tidal account (the audio quality improvement is immediately apparent, BTW) to replace my Google Play Music... er, YouTube Music instigated brewing household clusterf*ck (the chance was screwing with my wife & two little kids' ability to listen to music with the ease and predictability they had with Google Play Music).
6. I can cast Tidal to the Chromecast from my phone, so I figured I could link it in my Google Home device, and our household music situation would be basically back to normal. Nope...NOPE!
7. You can't set Tidal as a music service for your Google Home, which turned me into the family's sporadic impromptu disc jockey throughout the day, and entirely broke the kids' ability to manage their own music enjoyment.
8. Turns out Amazon's device ecosystem doesn't have this problem, so the Chromecast got replaced with a Fire TV stick and an Alexa pod.
In one felled swoop, via the most utterly existentially dubious product rollout and migration, Google managed to motivate me to eat the switching cost of replacing 100% of their hardware and 100% of their media services from my family's life. Truly a spectacular "own goal" on Google's behalf... and for what? What is even the point of YouTube Music?
I really want to like Tidal but I can't support Tidal's endorsement of MQA[1] - an audiophile scam and an attempt to lock music into yet another proprietary format. While they still use it, I won't sign up and I'll continue to dissuade others from doing so.
I tried Deezer, Spotify, Amazon, and Tidal in one day. Tidal had the best mix of predictable intuitive behavior, easy to use UI, and as a bonus it seemed to have the best sound quality.
Though this may not be all that obvious in most setups, it just so happens that one of the persistent relics of a bygone era in my life, when I had more money than brains, is an underappreciated (I mean our TV is hooked to it and plays rounds and rounds of, "We are the Dinosaurs" children's classic), but almost-embarassingly high-end stereo system.
I use Plex to store my TV, Movies, and Music. One nice feature is that you can have your own music AND integrate Tidal to augment your music collection. It works pretty well.
Oh? No kidding? I think my TrueNAS machine has a way to setup Plex pretty easily. Maybe I'll give that a shot this weekend. That machine incidentally already has all my old lossless CD rips on it as an archive from before I uploaded them all to Google.
"We’re gradually going to shut down Google Play Music, the Music Store on Google Play and Music Manager soon, with everyone losing access in the months to come. You can read our full announcement here. This announcement follows the launch of our new migration process (back in May) which lets all Google Play Music listeners easily transfer their data and make the simple switch to YouTube Music"
Interestingly, no mention of the new requirement to pay $9.99 pm to listen to your own music in the background, or the fact that ads will play on previously purchased tracks without becoming a premium subscriber.
I'm also on Android in Europe, with no YouTube Music subscription, and it lets me play music in the background, without ads, if it's either on the device or in the "Uploads" section (which is where it's put music I'd purchased on Google Play Music). So it looks like they haven't completely removed that functionality, although the interface for accessing it is significantly more annoying.
This is a bummer. I gather that I'm one of the few users of Google Play Music, so it's not surprising it's being killed. But it was one of the few streaming services that had the ability to upload your own music, a good catalog, and widespread device support.
YouTube music is OK, but worse in a bunch of respects. It separates out your uploaded music into a separate library (admittedly the matching in Play Music was always a bit wonky, but better than just giving up on the problem) which makes finding and managing music much more annoying. The UI is also really, really slow. Tt loads a single page of albums / songs / whatever at a time and takes a second to load the next one.
This can turn the process of scrolling through your albums, which has been effortless since iTunes debuted, into a multi-minute process. I've been hoping ever since they announced the switch that they would improve this stuff but it doesn't look like they've made any progress.
Yeah, I'm in the same boat. I'm thinking of putting my music in my Google Drive and using Plex (on a seedbox server). So my music is safe and accessible but I still need to pay for a streaming service because I like the discovery options they have.
I made the switch to plex because of the end of google music. You can get a tidal subscription through plex which has worked ok. It still separates your libraries, but you can create combined playlists.
Same boat here. I was a Google play music user for a long time, but switched to Spotify for good as soon as they announced YouTube music. The writing on the wall was there.
I thought I'd never leave the Google Play subscription, it was by far the best value covering both Play music + ad-free YouTube. But with this move I'll be switching over to an Apple One subscription once available later in the year.
Google Play is simple, clean with syncing that just works everywhere I need to access it with a simple checkmark to specify which playlists I want downloaded that worked well in offline mode. Now I'm being forced into using a new music web, mobile & car play apps which prioritizes music videos? I don't think so.
I don't know which bean counters are responsible for this decision but I can't imagine the cost of maintaining a skeleton crew to upkeep a frozen service would be more than the irreparable harm done to its millions of customers being forced to a use a service they don't want to, who'll be using it as an inflection point for deciding which Service they'd prefer to use instead.
I'll still be keeping the ad-free YouTube for the near future, but it went from being indispensable to being the next subscription on the chopping block if my time on YouTube wanes further. I'm already spending more of my time on Twitch, that if the move to Apple Music is well received by the family I'll be leaving Google Play entirely over this.
You can also bet my trust for investing in using new Google services is also shot at this point, I'd rather put my time and resources into a customer focused alternative than the disregard Google has shown its long time customers, time and again.
My guess is that new contracts meant that the current service would either lose a bunch of money, or not be possible. Maybe because of the upload your own music stuff.
You can also upload your music to YTM, but it’s actually almost impossible to use and (intentionally?) siloed off from the rest of the user-experience (search, playback and playlists).
So I’ve stopped using it because as a user it no longer works.
I miss original Songza. Google, could you just let me have original Songza back? You killed it with your merge to Google Music, and now its only remnants are titles to some of the playlists you try to hide and never recommend.
Google used to be the brand of cutting edge innovation and an optimistic technofuture...now they’re much more a brand of unreliable, half-baked ideas spread far too thin.
In the last few days, I've seen a lot of people getting angry at Spotify and (now) at Google Music. What I am surprised at is so few folks are talking about going back to physical media.
Music CDs will take up physical space and might be more expensive upfront (though I doubt they'll be so in the long run). However, the upsides are huge. One, you own the content forever - even if you switch countries or want to pass it along to your children. Two, you can rip higher quality audio (such as FLAC as opposed to max 320 kbps from streaming services). Three, you get a physical artifact of the music you love (artwork and all).
I buy music on Bandcamp in flac. This way I can do what I want with it and store it in perpetuity. I'm not interested in going back to physical media but I like owning the music I care about instead of just renting it.
1. Music is a commodity, everything should be available everywhere all the time. I don't care about "owning" my music, I care about listening to music.
2. Quality is good enough on Spotify. I'm not even sure I can notice the difference between Spotify and a CD playing on the same system. And I don't want to spend time on ripping and tagging and sorting and storing music.
3. I have enough stuff.
Spoken as someone who spent an inordinate amount of time and money buying and ripping CD's back in the days. And downloading from torrent sites of course. My digital music collection was huge and in neat order. Threw it all away when Spotify came on the scene.
I hate physical media and I think most others do as well. It is inconvenient, you can't make a playlist and it gets damaged.
I can buy downloadable MP3s from Amazon, if I wanted to own the music.
Thing is, I don't. I want a streaming service that has all the music ever produced, that I can hook into the player of my choice, and one that works on my phone when I am driving, and at my computer at work when I am working and at my home computer when I am at home.
CDs wouldn't do any of that and they are a pain to rip and I don't want the music on different devices.
I can't hear the difference between a 256+ MP3 and neither can most people. I won't argue that nobody can, but most people who have thousands of dollars in audio equipment probably weren't streaming to begin with.
I agree with to you a point but how am I supposed to find new music to buy without some kind of radio/recommendation system. FM radio certainly doesn't play the type of music I like.
I'm thinking I'll buy some of the songs I had marked in Google Play Music. I'm not sure I'll buy all of them or even if I can.
Also I haven't owned a CD player that connects to a computer in 7 years. Even the gamer PC I just built 2 months ago I didn't put a drive in it.
> but how am I supposed to find new music to buy without some kind of radio/recommendation system
You can do both; use Spotify / Youtube whatever to find new songs, and then buy your own copy if you find something you like.
> Also I haven't owned a CD player that connects to a computer in 7 years. Even the gamer PC I just built 2 months ago I didn't put a drive in it.
Personally I no longer buy CD’s, I buy files on Bandcamp etc., but with the exception of the artwork most of the advantages are the same. And the songs synchronise with your tablet, your phone and will always be there without internet connection. I have a Spotify enabled DJ-app, and that integration stopped working recently, which was inconvenient, but really not a big deal because I have the files for my core library.
> I'm thinking I'll buy some of the songs I had marked in Google Play Music. I'm not sure I'll buy all of them or even if I can.
That’s a great idea. It’s true that you won’t find everything. But in between Bandcamp (lossless and big cut to artists), Qobuz (lossless and more major labels) and the iTunes Store (high quality AAC, cheap) a lot more is available than before, and DRM free. A much better situation than with video, for example.
Yeah I’ve stuck with MP3s since the days when you could only download 1 per night. I’ve been made fun of uncountable times by friends and strangers alike, but I’ve never had my music-listening not work, no matter what device/OS.
So, the migration doesn't work. it fails to see the musics I have on file in my phone. Also, I'm in a third world country (Burundi) where a lot of the musics are blocked for being played. I purchased an album in the old Google Play Music but the new Youtube Music doesn't allow me to see my purchased music without a VPN. This is really incompetence from Google.
I subscribed to Google Play Music All-Access for years and wouldn't have cancelled[1] if not for regional pricing making Spotify half the price. The music selection was far greater than Spotify and the like, I could upload and match my purchases elsewhere, and their radio algorithm was actually really good. (I sorely miss it after using Spotify's)
But YouTube Music is just a mess. I migrated my library to YTM and my experience is like the rest, but worse:
* You can't migrate to brand (aka alias) accounts. All of my likes, uploads, favorites, recommendation profile are on my alias but to listen to my music I have to switch to my real name account. Oh, but aliases can still use YT Music, so there's virtually no reason for this restriction.
* Switching accounts is for both YT and YT Music. So if I switch back to my alias on [normal] YT, the already-open YT Music tab will stop the music and ask me to switch back or refresh.
* All of my music poured into "Liked Videos". Except only about ~180 songs are there and I had over a thousand saved, if not thousands. No idea where the rest are.
* Some of the songs are "not available in your country" but if I search for it and find the official music video, that one is.
* This applied to GPM too, but: no desktop app. You can pretend the web app is a desktop app (and it's a little smoother than GPM at least) but it's still much more taxing than even a webview app like Spotify's.
[1] Fun fact: if you unsubscribe from GPM All-Access, your liked/saved songs that aren't uploaded disappear but are still in the DB, so you can't even see them. I don't know if they're part of Google Takeout, but when I moved to Spotify that meant I had to remember what songs I liked.
Yup yup. I tried. I really tried to like YouTube Music, but it is just not working. I sent multiple feedbacks, but things aren't improving nor have I heard back from them.
I am currently back to Google Music...! Sooo much better. I'm not sure what I will do after they shut it down for good. Probably resort back to last.fm for recommendation and hop to another streaming platform.
YT Music sucks and I just cancelled it yesterday (signed up for Google Play Music was was great).
Google Play Music has the best recommendation tech.
YT Music (and Spotify) have very poor recommendation tech.
Examples:
Spotify Playlist "Morning Pickup"
First song is someone depressed they know they should break up but can't yet do it. Second song is about someone longing for their ex while in their current relationship. Maybe I interpreted this wrong. I assumed "Morning Pickup" was supposed to be music played to "pick me up", make me ready for the day, in other words, happy or inspiring music. Instead it could have just meant music promoted this morning.
Spotify: Prince (Radio)
Spotify plays rap. AFAIK that's a racist suggestion. Prince had nothing to do with rap. The only connection is that he's African American.
Youtube Music: Song "Fuck you till your Groove" by Jill Jones (radio)
Youtube plays "Such a Shame" by Talk Talk and "All Night Long" by Lionel Richie as suggested followup songs!?! WTFBBQ!!
Youtube Music: Swingrowers (Radio) (this is a Swing or Electro-Swing group)
Youtube plays "Bliss on Mushrooms" by Infected Mushroom
Youtube Music: Prince (Radio)
Youtube plays "I Wanna Dance with Somebody" by Whitney Houston, "Inspector Horse" by Todd Terge, A bunch of Micheal Jackson, "Don't Let Me Be Misunderstood" by Santa Esmeralda, "Heart of Glass" by Blondie. Those all of next to nothing to do with Prince.
I agree 100% and thank you for providing examples.
I would pay a premium for a music service that isn't providing such incompetent recommendation engine.
Unfortunatly Apple Music is even worse at that. I have canceled after 30 days of heavy metal being pushed down my throat day after day - the only genre I do not listen to.
And yet, Google play music didn't hold a candle to lastfm radio. But I feel you, I don't know how with all the ML stuff companies suppose to do, the music recommendation only seems to get worse.
Youtube Music has poor integration with my Google Assistant. I suspect many of the PMs do not use Google products at all or it would be readily apparent.
The big advantage is being able to play music from videos, which opens up a much larger catalogue.
Google Play Music wasn't very popular, but it was surprisingly good. YouTube Music is ok, but it lacks that quality without a name and has many small glitches that make it much less pleasant to use.
No, its quite bad. In addition to being flat-out buggy (I've had it multiple times in the last week just decide to switch to a playlist it invented rather than the one it was directed to play), it doesn't support basic music playing functionality like song or playlist repeat, and (surprisingly) its Google Assistant integration is awful, forcing you to use casting from a different device for basic tasks with an Assistant-powered speaker.
And you cannot play a single song that you've just searched, everything is in an auto-generated playlist. Including normal YT videos that it detects as music just because there are some music playing in it. It's awful and I won't make the switch. My subscription ends when GPM dies.
What platform are you on. because I know for a fact that you can repeat individual songs, and playlists on the Android app. I'm also wondering about the casting, since I regularly cast (again from the Android app) to my minis at home.
> What platform are you on. because I know for a fact that you can repeat individual songs, and playlists on the Android app.
That's...bizarre.
I'm on Android, and the repeat icon, which I know for a fact was not showing up in the app on my phone any time from when I was forced to use because Google Play Music stopped working on my home speakers through last night, is now showing up. (And, while there is an new update to the app, I haven't installed it yet, so its not an app update.)
> I'm also wondering about the casting, since I regularly cast (again from the Android app) to my minis at home.
Casting works fine from the app (well, playlist bugs excluded), the problem is having to cast from the app for lots of simple tasks where voice commands worked for GPM. As music is part of the bedtime routine for my toddler and preschooler, having everything suddenly be much less straightforward has been...unpleasant.
The playlists behavior (once they finally let us import them) isn't great, so I've been using the "Your Mix" feature a lot. It's pretty good, but there are a couple songs I've Thumbs Downed that keep popping up in my mix anyway.
Bad UI + incredibly simple, stupid things like that drive me crazy. Google Music wasn't great, but it was far better tha YouTube Music.
When they first released it like 9 years ago, it was great. I still had my Droid Incredible, and the fact that I could upload all my offline music to their cloud and listen to it from wherever...was a dream.
I'm a Google Play subscriber, and I'm pissed, because YouTube Music was always forcing videos on me, and was harder to use for offline listening (stopping music when I locked the screen, like other people).
What is better to switch to right now, YouTube Music, or Spotify?
I made the switch to Apple Music after GPM went on life support. It's got some weird UI choices (Apple conventions, I assume - I'm on Android), but I've been pretty happy with it, and it's more or less sold me on investigating how far an android user can invest in their cloud services ecosystem.
I avoid Spotify because I'm leery of their podcast play, especially given their employee's protests over the Rogan contract. Just because Rogan's too valuable an asset to compromise, doesn't mean they won't go after smaller podcasters.
Apple by contrast has been a fairly responsible steward of the podcasting ecosystem with its publicly available index, and hasn't attempted to exert undue control over individual podcasts beyond delisting them from their search engine.
I entirely stopped using streaming services and now buy and download my music from Bandcamp, using webradios to discover new titles (my personal favorite is the webradio Nordic Lodge Copenhagen, SomaFM also has a lot of good thematic radios).
I don't have any trouble listening to my collection when internet gets spotty, I can have real full shuffle on my collection without hearing always the same titles coming again and again, and I'm guaranteed I own my music, with no-one able to take it from me. It feels like the future :)
I've done the same but my problem is that a lot of artists (labels?) only made their songs available to purchase on itunes and google music. Now there's only itunes which of course only works with the native app and doesn't have Linux support.
Well, as far as I'm concern, if they only provide content with DRM, then piracy is fair game. I pondered for a time if I should buy the content on abusive platforms and then download it illegally without DRMs, but I decided that respect must go both way. Just to be clear, I pay for a lot of music every week and I even give a lot every months to charities, this is not about money and my difficulty to part with it. Ultimately, I very rarely use piracy anyway because when I have to, I lose respect for artists and don't want to listen to them anymore (it's not me making it political, it's just a feeling that happens when I realize the artist will force spyware on me). The only content I download through piracy is from long dead artists, mostly (they didn't chose to only be available with DRM).
That being said, I've been surprised how common it is to find albums on Bandcamp or bands' own sites. It may be the music I listen to (I try to never limit me to a few "genres", but I very commonly listen to music with small audience). I guess fees asked by platforms have something to do with it too.
If you watch YouTube, then probably it's best to stick with Google since you get ad-free YouTube with your subscription (I think?) . Otherwise probably Spotify is better.
I have both Youtube and Google Play subscription, but never listen to Youtube music because the sound quality is quite bad. But now I'm getting really pissed:
Youtube Music has only 256kbit AAC compression...that's a no go for me. I tried Tidal once, but the user interface was very slow, so I unsubscribed.
I can't say I've had that experience, I've never had YT music throw a video at me. I've seen them listed as results in searches though. The YT Music move annoys me more because it all just seems like such a dumb waste of time, and Google is making me think and expend effort to service their corporate nonsense.
(for me, I'm sticking with YT Music over Spotify because you also get a YouTube Red subscription, and no ads on YouTube is worth it for me personally)
I moved my purchased music to YT Music in additional to having previously downloaded it but I am not super happy: the old model of buying a song or an album and then downloading it seems to no longer be an option in this craven new world - I guess they don't want my money if it does not arrive vassal-like in fixed monthly amounts.
Amazon doesn't allow HD music in their Linux client and unfortunately does not play nicely with the Google ecosystem. Shame too because I really liked it.
I moved to Spotify. Tried YTM which just a couple weeks ago lacked many basic features - you couldn't go from a song to the album listing or the artist page, you couldn't browse albums alphabetically, and many more - now it seems all those missing features are added. It actually looks decent now, so maybe I'll consider it in the future - but I'm already migrated now - they needed up the launch badly.
I was a google play music user since its inception and I switched to spotify. I paid 10$ for a tool to port over all my playlists, some which had over 800 songs. It was about 95% accurate so I'm a happy camper. Spotify's bread and butter is their music player so they're not going to cancel it anytime soon. lol
I switched to Spotify and I'm pretty happy. It's a bit more buggy and some features are missing, but overall it's a decent replacement and I'm liking the playlists/radio more.
YT music is a downgrade from Google Play Music. The web player for YT music is missing a bunch of features:
- clear queue
- multi-select in queue
- save queue as playlist
- high resolution album covers
- play count
It's great to consolidate overlapping products. But, why can't a company with 20,000 engineers bring YT music up to feature parity before killing off the better product?
[1] "A list of the tracks, playlists, radio stations, uploads, and purchases in your Google Play Music library" Key to me was my playlists, including my "Thumbs Up" playlist, which as others have noted is polluted by "Liked" music videos on Youtube in the migration
Google strikes me as the kind of company where middle-management "just wants or needs to do _something_ to demonstrate _impact_" and just goes ahead and does it their way, and meanwhile, developers (who undoubtedly are top-notch in their own regard) also want to put their skills to good use and just decide to do it "their way" too, with no synchronizing/harmonizing interface between those two groups. And every once in a while, a developer or UX researcher gets thrown in the mix (or middle) to try and build some kind of a bridge between them. It really looks like projects are started out of a crazy overnight "we need to do SOMETHING NOW" hurry, and then 6 months down the road, everyone just sort of lost interest and moved on to other things.
How is it not profitable to stream music at a premium? The Spotify guy is worth 7 billion with little to show for the modern music artist.
Also, a huge "wtf" from me for:
>I do not want to pay for a streaming service and would like to buy individual songs & albums instead. How can I do this on YouTube Music?
>While you cannot purchase music from YouTube Music, you can do so from another store and upload that music into YouTube Music. This way, you can have your entire music library in one place. Note that you can play uploaded songs in the background, ad-free and offline with a free YouTube Music subscription.
Nice, I can upload my music to your service, and pay you to access music I paid for already? How's that expression go? "Smooth move, ex-lax."
Youtube music is absolute garbage. I can't use my youtube account, and I have to use my google account to access my tranferred music. And if I switch to my google account, I am logged out of youtube, and all my subscriptions are gone.
I listen to very uncommon music that's not available anywhere to be streamed. Google Play Music was the only solution for streaming all my collection. I am looking for replacements... please let me know if you have any. My current bet is something like owncloud.
It can, I use nginx as the reverse proxy along with Let's Encrypt certificates for HTTPS connectivity. As long as your ISP allows you to forward ports you're good to go.
I've used Google Play Music as the player for the mp3 files I've copied to my Android phone, ever since I got the phone. Never touched the online capabilities. It was perfect, did everything I wanted just the way I liked it. Then suddenly one day it was just gone.
Anybody have a recommendation for an mp3 player app that works mostly the same?
Although I've recently moved my library in to Plex, which handles sync between devices (you can set the app to copy some/all files to your phone storage). In addition to the Plex app, they also have Plexamp for a music-focused UX.
It's very nice if you're willing to put in a little setup effort.
And since you run the server, you know it will never be shut down on you.
I had the same experience. I just went in and the app does nothing. I had to disable updates and disable the app completely and find Vanilla Music Player to replace it.
Great, I can't uninstall it because it came preloaded (thanks Google) and now I won't be able to use it.
Edit - boy looking forward to this experience. Open the app - CTA for a trial, close it, screen changes, same CTA comes up again. Oh just played a song and had an advert and another premium sign-up thing come up.
I don't get how google can fuck themselves so much closing used products without having a proper replacement. I have bough many albums on the google play music store with the promise to be able to stream whenever I wan't. I don't want to fall on the subscription hype, and used to bough an album each month instead of paying for a subscription. Of course I can download them and se them offline, but for a company like google to be unable to maintain a basic promised service and instead closing it seems like an insult.
I was experimenting on having all my music on my nas and streaming directly from there instead of relying on another subscription service, so I think I will try to move everything to that (currently the only thing I lack is streaming directly to my tv, because i don't have that use case often).
Google Play Music was great. It let you put your music library in the cloud and play it anywhere. Simple! Pay money and extend it with Google’s streaming catalogue too. Even better!
A simple product with a clear identity. In many ways a finished product with no need of big changes or a replacement. A Spotify-killer really. It certainly killed my Spotify-account.
YouTube music is the exact opposite in every way. No clear identity, it’s main selling point is some vague benefit of having access to the “YouTube catalogue”. Whatever. And your uploaded music is deliberately siloed off in a separate section which doesn’t integrate at all with the normal playback, search and playlist-functionality. A complete joke.
Why oh why does Google think this is an improvement for ... anyone? It’s offensive, really.
I canceled after they screwed up the last service I liked and paid for from google.
I wish I could upload my music to spotify and redownload it again at will but otherwise its even offering the same decent suggestions, just went back to using adblock on youtube videos without a problem.
You kind of can do that with Spotify. It's not as transparent and convenient as Google Music was, but you can still listen to your own music files and bring them with you on a phone.
I use Amazon music because it lets you download DRM-free MP3s and lets me easily switch between iPhone and Android. I just wish it didn't reset to 'cloud' when I want it in 'offline' mode because I live in a patchy area.
I find it doubly ironic that you linked to this subreddit about rage over a inferior GPM-replacement of a streaming service, and you did so with a link which was specifically hard-coded to use the old Reddit UI, instead of this new inferior one.
Youtube Music is the worst music player I have ever used. Is impossible to use without internet connection: even playing downloaded songs need to wait for the album picture to be downloaded. And a lot of other bugs...
I absolutely hate how YouTube music doesn't understand that I am using it for music... not music videos.
"Hey Google, play my music" on a Nest Hub in the kitchen so I can listen to something while cooking used to play music - now it often (but not always) insists on running whatever crazy video it found for my tunes.
I simply don't watch music videos. I have no interest in them. I don't like that they joined together my music and misc YouTube clicks together.
I'm now looking for an alternative. I just want what I had before. Listen to music and skip the videos so I can cook in peace.
Given how utterly terrible YT Music is, I have to think there is an underlying business reason they were forced to do this. Do they save on royalties and licensing by only having one channel for music?
If they didn't bundle YouTube Premium with the music subscription I would have ditched it and switched to Spotify. As it is, I'm considering getting a phone with enough storage and just switching back to mp3s. Google still doesn't understand what music lovers want(like not skipping to the next track abruptly if there is a momentary connection issue).
Ughh. This is so sad. The company google acquired to make Google Play Music (Songza) was one of my favorite music streaming services and they basically just tanked it. For seemingly no reason
Yes, Google left me with 24hs no music on my phone. Glad I'm switching Apple next month. Google Play Music was the most horrible experience along with the new Youtube Music app.
One of the issues I'm having is that there are far more songs from artists showing up on compilation albums ("Hits of the 90s!"), as well as crappy cover tunes. I want the original song from the original album, thanks. I've also had a couple mislabeled songs, like the other day a track by the Hollies was actually a Beatles tune when I played it. Not a cover, a different song altogether. What the hell?
Hm. Is Google thinking of selling off Youtube to avoid antitrust problems? Centralizing entertainment content under the YouTube brand is a step in that direction.
Any good play that works well with Google Drive as storage? I tried a few but none seems to work well with music files Google Drive. I would prefer if they maintain some cache as well. If I can't find one, I might just write one over the weekend. Let Google Drive do the storage, and I will create the bare minimal player which can play music files. That setup will last for eternity.
Is there a self hosted alternative to Google Play Music? The software was an excellent free service- just not very good at making money for Google. A lot of us with music collections are running NAS- surely something can fill the void. Right now I'm using MusicBee for playing flac locally, Spotify for streaming on the go.
I migrated to ampache a while back. Other than a bad UI it's really solid. It supports the subsonic API (among others) so you can use one of those apps.
Given that Google Play Music was the default app for "I just want to play that folder full of MP3s on my phone", and YouTube Music really isn't handling that use case well, what other player do people use/recommend for this?
I don't care about online features. Folder, mp3, maybe a m3u/m3u8 file, play. Simple.
I bought some albums when I was using google for everything with the thought that I'm buying the equivalent of a physical CD but without the irritating extra physical item.
That was a stupid thought, of course. Everything's kinda temporary in the new economy. That said, Apple has been pretty damned stable on this area.
YT Music is atrocious. On the bright side, it encouraged me to try self-hosting my library (using Navidrome). I haven't figured out how to replace GPM's recommendation engine yet, but that's not a big deal because YTM's recommendations are useless.
So, everything works for me on youtube music, except the integration with Sonos lacks the "start radio" feature, which is 99% of what I use my Sonos for. If they don't gain this feature before shutting down GPM, then I'm going to cancel my YT sub.
And that's why we need to split these huge companies. Google just doesn't care if you and all commenters of this thread cancel their subscription. Their ads are doing quite well.
Smaller companies WILL care for their individual customers.
YouTube Music is sucks, but it's still precious service that support upload locker feature. The other one is Apple Music, I'll go for it if I used only iPhone/iPad/Mac.
For people who used google services for 5+ years, dobyou have ANY insentive to try new google services knowing that there is a high chance of it being half-baked and killed in afew years?
Google Play Music was one of the few Google services I used because there wasn't a good alternative. I'm switching to Emby for hosting/streaming and Amazon for purchases.
I wish Google would just stick with their products and iterate on them. Instead, they completely stop making fixes and improvements to their products, silently abandon them, and secretly start working on a totally new replacement product. That's probably cleaner to do internally, but it's a horrible experience for users.
I generally like to use Google software, but in the time it took them to reinvent their music player from the ground up while neglecting the previous version, I moved to Spotify.
I'm still a little bummed that I had (given away freely) access to a bunch of albums on Microsoft Groove Music and didn't notice they were vanishing / forgot to download them before the service vanished. Props to Takeout/Play Music for making my songs available for download as a ZIP file, I think.
Play Music was often a totally baffling experience.
If I wasn't paying them money and wasn't enrolled in any subscription, what happens when I type the name of a song I don't "own" into the Play Music app? Sometimes it starts playing the song; sometimes it starts playing ads, then fifteen seconds of the song, then silence; sometimes it starts playing the song, then random other songs somehow related to that; sometimes it suggests a "radio station" (?) of music similar to that song, and sometimes playing that station does nothing, or sometimes it plays a song and tells me I need to buy a service to hear more songs, or sometimes it plays that song, then an ad, then another related song, then an ad, then stops playing songs altogether and the app just doesn't play any music while showing me a UI that says it's trying to load and play a song.
One time I subscribed to a free trial of the Play Music streaming service and listened to a bunch of radio songs for a long time and thumbs-up liked them and I think this tailored me to hear more songs like the ones that I had liked, and that was pretty cool, I think. I could even see all my "thumbs up" songs later and replay the ones I liked! Then I paid for that subscription for a while, and then it lapsed, and then I could still see my thumbs-up songs but I couldn't play them anymore because I wasn't a subscriber, except sometimes picking some of them would play, and then sometimes it wouldn't. Boy I spent tens of hours, maybe hundreds, listening to Play Music songs and thumbs upping them this way. I've totally forgotten that experience and how baffling it was until just now.
Basically I could not figure out how to play music in Play Music.
Except for music that I "owned". In my Google Play Music collection, I "owned" some albums that I don't ever remember buying or "buying" for $0 and have no record or receipt of ever putting into my playlist. I looked, I looked for the transaction history about how these albums and songs entered my account, and I just could not find them at all.
One example was, um ... let me see if I can find it, oK I can't look it up in the Play Music app anymore because it's been decommissioned but I can open the YouTube Music app and look, hmmm okay, no songs in there? Oh, right, I need to sign out of YouTube account 'mherdeg' (mherdeg@gmail.com) and into YouTube account 'mherdeg@gmail.com' (mherdeg@gmail.com) because the Play Music=>YouTube Music Transfer Process only supported sign-in-with-Google YouTube accounts? which is not the kind of account I normally use in YouTube and not the one where I keep all my other playlists and listening history? Huh. Okay, switched to that other identically named account which is an empty shell. There's all that transferred music.
Right, so looking at that in the category called "uploaded", somehow just to pick one example, I can listen to an album which is an album I used to "own" in Play Music and I have absolutely no recollection of asking for it, the trippy psychedelic album "Bloom and Decay" by a band called "Giant Cloud" based in New Orealns? Which is fantastic music but I have no idea why I have the rights to listen to it or where it came from into my Play Music collection. There must have been some promotional offer of a whole bunch of $0 albums a few year ago?.
Truly it is like some kind of fever dream.
Oh, and back when Play Music worked, trying to play the songs I "owned" was very confusing on a new phone. What I would do was set up my brand new Android phone, sign in to my Google Account, then open Play Music and notice there were no songs. I would search for a song title from one of the albums I "owned" and it would show me the confusing song/radio/subscription streaming service experience mentioned beforehand, with no indication that I had access to this music. A quick Web search eventually found that I needed to toggle a setting to sync my Play Music music into Play Music, and after I toggled this setting and made sure wifi was on and closed and reopened the app I saw my songs, and then I could play them.
I did love love love Play Music for letting me download all my albums and play that music offline. In "offline mode" the experience was awesome for, you know, playing songs. Except that sometimes on a new phone it wouldn't actually download music, with a notification saying that songs were being downloaded but zero visible progress in the app after tens of minutes, and I couldn't figure out why, but usually rebooting the phone and waiting a while worked.
Have Google Play Music, will be switching to Apple Music. The YT droning every time I fire it up is too much, and it seems like the migration doesn’t work either.
Why do you do this to yourselves, google employees on HN?
I migrated to iBroadcast. It's free, and it seems to fit my fairly minimal needs. In particular, it allowed uploading everything I dumped from GPM (~7k tracks, apparently), and allows specifying which songs should always be available offline on an Android device. Presumably it has the usual streaming features and online music acquisition features as well, but I don't use any of them.
The client has an option that claims to do some normalization that I hoped would prevent large deltas in volume between tracks - in practice this seems worse than what I got from the GPM player. I mostly listen to long heterogenous playlists on shuffle, so this probably wouldn't matter to people who listen to full albums.
I believe they have some monetization plan involving allowing higher bitrate playback, but I don't think I can really tell the difference.
I did try migrating to Youtube Music first and gave up after one too many annoyances.
I'm looking as well. I came across asti.ga, which looks promising as it can use a variety of cloud backends, but haven't got around to using it yet. I'm actually also considering a plex setup.
I understand why the switch to the new service was needed, from a license/business perspective. But no idea why they can't just listen to their users and at least match feature-wise the product it's supposed to replace. I've lost faith in Google's ability to produce software and not just endlessly rebrand things.