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Sorry TC the reality is barely anyone but aging millennials are keeping 20k songs around in mp3 format. Google killed the service because no one really uses it
by spaceflunky 6y ago
Sorry TC the reality is barely anyone but aging millennials are keeping 20k songs around in mp3 format. Google killed the service because no one really uses it and it didn’t make sense to keep staffing it. But more so than that no one at google wants to work on a product no one uses. You won’t get promoted that way.
- Topgamer7 6y agoYeah everyone keeps it around as 20,000 flac files now!
- layoutIfNeeded 6y ago20k?? Lol! Those are rookie numbers. That’s like the most essential albums I’m carrying around on my phone for daily use...
- Cloudef 6y agoFlac is meant for archival purposes. You transcode to opus for listening.
- theandrewbailey 6y agoStorage is cheap. I prefer FLAC if I have the space to spare. Hey, look, another backup of my music collection!
- AdmiralAsshat 6y agoEven with generous storage space, I can only justify keeping maybe one copy of the album in FLAC. And then it comes down to which version will I archive as FLAC: the original pressing? The recent remaster? The "collector's edition"? The ridiculously hard-to-find Japanese SACD pressing?
- layoutIfNeeded 6y agoAll of them. Preferably with a 600dpi scan of each artwork.
- xyzzy_plugh 6y agoMy dad is in his 70s and had all his music in Google Music. It was great for him. Now he doesn't know what to do. It's death by a thousand cuts for Google at this rate.
- seibelj 6y agoThe core of google is search. All their money is in search. Everything else is argued in service of search as a loss leader, such as Android which drives users to search but in itself costs a ton of money to maintain. If it didn’t drive users to search, it wouldn’t have value. What if search falters? If Apple or Amazon beats it, or at least cuts the most profitable aspects of it. Or perhaps people finally care about privacy and switch to Duck Duck Go. I fear google will fall apart - all of their loss leaders that serve search will die, and it will become Gmail / Youtube co. Its cloud is on life support as it is, and IT in-the-know assumes all their B-grade services will be cancelled. Plus the trust-busters are knocking! If I were to bet on which FAANG will have the most trouble in this decade, it's [G]oogle.
- Yetanfou 6y agoThe core of Google is its advertising business, search is but one of the ways they feed that beast.
- WalterBright 6y ago> What if search falters? Bing?
- tibu 6y agoYou can upload your music to Spotify (until they stop providing it too).
- nl 6y agoCan you? I'm a long time Spotify user and didn't know about this. I know about https://support.spotify.com/us/article/listen-to-local-files/ https://support.spotify.com/us/article/listen-to-local-files... which isn't the same thing at all.
- shard 6y agoSurely I can't be the only one who still have cars which do not stream music, and so I have to put MP3s on CDs and USB sticks. Also, my wireless earbuds have built-in storage, so I load a bunch of music onto it and work out without carrying my phone with me. I also have a bunch of DJ mixes which are not available on online streaming services. Finally, I load MP3s onto my phone when I fly so that I can listen to music on the plane and in foreign countries. For all those reasons, I still keep and curate a pile of MP3s.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- SkyMarshal 6y agoSame, and I will do everything I can to never have my frikkin car connected to the Internet. I’d rather just put my whole music library onto an SD card and plug into my car stereo, or use a Bluetooth connection to my iPhone.
- asdfasgasdgasdg 6y agoI used to have one of those. Then I fixed it. Installing a new head unit is not terribly difficult and we'll worth doing.
- MrGilbert 6y agoWell, I upgraded my car with an aftermarket headunit, that is capable of Apple CarPlay. This + a Wifi/LTE-Stick, which opens a hotspot as soon as I start the car. While I preload mostly everything (sh*tty mobile, because germany), thanks to my phone being attached to my car, I can open a VPN tunnel to my music library at home. A really appreciate the "hackability" of older cars.
- kristofferR 6y agoA Xiaomi Roidmi 3S (good Bluetooh>FM car stick) is just $15, that'll enable you to easily play whatever is on your phone on your car radio.
- shard 6y ago
- smt88 6y ago> no one at google wants to work on a product no one uses As far as I can tell, the opposite is true. Everyone at Google wants to work on new products until they're released. Then the entire companies moves on, regardless of the number of users. This decision seems based entirely on a desire to rebrand and rebuild (an unfortunately common and user-hostile pattern at Google) rather than usage stats.
- smichel17 6y agoI'm in my mid twenties; do I count as an "aging millennial"?
- Shared404 6y agoI'll do you one better. I'm 20 +-2 years. Do I count as an aging millennial?
- danielbarla 6y agoThere will always be exceptions. OP was talking about the population at large, and it's important to think like that when you want to appeal to a large audience, like Google does. And I also think they are right about which age bracket is primarily hoarding mp3s in 2020; it's the ones that were young enough at the time to jump on to mp3s, but had enough time to build up a collection they would not want to lose. Of course, there will be other niches, such as audiophiles with flacs, or rare music collectors, etc, but compared to Joe Public, it's a drop in the ocean.
- krebs_liebhaber 6y ago> the reality is barely anyone but aging millennials are keeping 20k songs around in mp3 format. I'm a Zoomer with a decent collection of mp3s[0]. Silicon-Valley types tend to grossly underestimate just how "old-fashioned" the rest of the world is. [0]: [~/Music]$ find . -name "*.mp3" | wc -l 3157
- Shared404 6y agoFor other's like us who like to keep local audio files around, check out 'cmus'. It's my current favourite audio player.
- FrobozzElectric 6y agoDon't forget about beautiful, messy apps like Airsonic that you host yourself. It's the best solution IMO. You can listen to your whole collection at the quality you want on basically every platform. A fork of pSub is what I use a primary CLI player for it, but the mobile apps are also great. You can cache music locally, so I like to queue up a few albums before I leave the house (not that I do that often nowadays) so I can listen to them while driving without using any precious mobile data.
- Shared404 6y agoI'll have to look it up, sounds like a great addition to a homelab. Thanks!
- lioeters 6y agoLooks good! > cmus — C* Music Player > Small, fast and powerful console music player for Unix-like operating systems. https://cmus.github.io/ https://cmus.github.io/ https://github.com/cmus/cmus https://github.com/cmus/cmus ..But apparently no longer in active development? https://github.com/cmus/cmus/issues/856 https://github.com/cmus/cmus/issues/856
- Shared404 6y ago
- impassionedrule 6y agoAnyone that's into any niche/emerging artists struggle to find music (especially if they publish to SoundCloud) Being able to upload your own music and play it from any device is huge, yet the only alternative I've found is iBroadcast
- 29083011397778 6y agoJust an FYI - Subsonic (and forks such as Airsonic) would fit your wish of streaming & caching your own music to any device. There's clients for every device you care to name, even (surprisingly enough) a functioning client for my old BlackBerry Q10, with it's excellent speakers :) It is self-hosted, but that's more a question of desire than ability I'd imagine
- OscarTheGrinch 6y agoI keep anything remotely rare as mp3s. Streaming services are prone to sudden acts of mass extinction such as: api changes, licensing snafus, unprofitability of business model, Yoko Ono being in a huff that day. My only problem is backups, and storage is pretty cheap, much cheaper than vinyl. On a new build I install foobar2000, copy a few gigs of music to local and I'm good to go. Call me a dinosaur, but I like own a copy of something. It's a less disposable relationship with the music.
- gorgoiler 6y agoAnd my least favorite: surprise remastering. When you’ve listened to Rumors enough, anything but the original feels deeply uncomfortable.
- jeffbee 6y agoFor real, was just discussing this earlier today. Rumours is a masterpiece and all the later remasters are worse and worse. When you stream it, it's remaster roulette.
- gorgoiler 6y agoHah, apparently I remastered the spelling!
- OscarTheGrinch 6y agoYeah, remasters, no thanks. Bowie apparently hated how Lets Dance (the song) turned out, I had a remastered album where it was replaced with some dire 1990's techno version. And let's not forget probably the most common streaming flaw: internet outages.
- Moru 6y agoOh, and if it's local, search is instant, playback is instant, internet connectivity does not matter, no surprice updates, it just works. My player is Winamp and it still works just fine after all these years. If someone want's to talk to me I just press ctrl+shift+E to pause, don't need to find a window on the computer. Tired of the song playing? Press ctrl+shift+b for next song in whatever program/game I'm in at the moment. (My winamp has quake-controls because that was what I was playing when I found the global hotkey settings.
- raxxorrax 6y agoI don't think many of those would have even used Google Music. And conventional streaming services are only viable, if they allow to convert content to portable formats in my opinion. Maybe just a preference, but in my experience still widespread.
- ulrikrasmussen 6y agoI think I fall squarely into that category with a music library clocking in at about 49GiB. And I really get the convenience of streaming over having to manually sync files with your devices, which is also why I've been mirrorring my collection with a Subsonic instance on my VPS for years, which means that I can stream my music from anywhere. I know that this is not a solution that is viable to 99% of people who just want the convenience without the technical hassle. However, I think it's really sad that things turned out to become a dichotomy between owning and renting your music instead of a choice between managing your collection yourself vs. having someone else host it for you. I will claim that many people, if asked, would prefer to own their own music and be free to move from one hosted platform to another if they so desire, and not be limited to buy their music from a single provider. It would also result in a healthier market.
- dnautics 6y agoI'm thinking about working on a product that lets you stream your own music via webrtc sever from behind your own isp. Think this is something that might have a market?
- DaiPlusPlus 6y agoWhy stream over WebRTC when <audio> will work just fine?
- dnautics 6y agoYou can't get into your home server behind the ISPs nat so easily without something like webrtc.
- dleslie 6y agoI put my 80+gb mp3 collection on OneDrive; and I rsync that to my phone after ripping new CDs.
- fidelramos 6y agoTry Syncthing [1], it's what I use to sync my files, including my music collection (60 GB) to my phone. Works like a charm, it's free software and decentralized. [1] https://syncthing.net/ https://syncthing.net/
- jeffbee 6y agoI don't think your organizational analysis is congruent with reality. When Google announced their intention to roll Play Music into YT Music, there were several people working on both products, and they worked for years to merge them. If anything, rolling it over caused it to be even more staffed up than ever.
- irrational 6y agoI don't understand the desire to be promoted. I work for a Fortune 100 company on a product that is very low on the totem pole. I've been working on it for nearly 20 years. The work is very stress free and they pay me way way more than I need, especially considering the cost of living where I live. I'd happily stay here until retirement. Getting promoted would suck.
- jordanbeiber 6y agoTao & corporate wisdom. https://www.mit.edu/~xela/tao.html https://www.mit.edu/~xela/tao.html
- irrational 6y agoI've always had good managers who have protected our group from corporate politics. I've been very fortunate in that regard.
- greggman3 6y agoI believe you are correct that no one was using Google Play Music but I find it frustrating because in my experience it was the best streaming service. It's just Google being Google failed to figure out how or even try to market it. In particular its radio algorithm for finding similar music was miles ahead of Spotify, Apple Music, Youtube Music, etc.... I'm sure I'll be wrong but I suspect Youtube Music will also be cancelled. It's a worse service so why would anyone choose it?
- 14u2c 6y agoIf by aging millennials you mean people from 25 to 35 years of age then that is the often the largest and most sought after demographic for any product... I do agree on the politics of googlers though: once released its ignored.
- ChuckMcM 6y agoI expect you weren't intending to but you captured the essence of Google and the authors lament so succinctly. When I read your comment what I see is this: "Google doesn't care about you or what you think. Further, employees of Google aren't going to spend any time on products you care about if they can't get promoted by doing so." It captures the narcissism that is tech perfectly.
- WrtCdEvrydy 6y ago> the narcissism that is tech perfectly. Wanna see your career die quickly? Move to a maintenance project.
- DaiPlusPlus 6y agoI’d love to work on a maintenance project for a product I care about, though - and add small little incremental improvements over time and make my mark that way. If there’s a hiring manager at Google that wants someone to babysit products that shouldn’t die, but can’t attract career-oriented people to work on, ping me :)
- p1necone 6y agoMe too. I would love my job to be "clean up tech debt all day"
- slg 6y agoMany of us would be perfectly happy spending our entire career making hundreds of thousands of dollars working on a niche product that we are passionate about.
- raxxorrax 6y agoIf it is only career you are interested in, you would probably use Google as a ladder for higher positions elsewhere.
- pjmlp 6y agoThe large majority of enterpise projects are maintenance, if you want to see a career die quickly focus on being an expert in technology fad X. The best way to keep going is to diversify, not only being a generalist, but also extending the soft skills, don't funnel too much in technology for technology's sake, and the career will be just fine, even with maintenance projects.
- zenexer 6y agoAnd for those of us who have no choice? Not all of us have mainstream taste. Unless you like the music that’s most popular in your particular corner of the world, some of your favorites are likely to be missing from streaming services—and even if you fit nicely into that mold, there are still licensing issues at times. Then what? For example: - I tend to favor European music, but I live in North America. Many of the artists I like are mainstream in Europe, but their music isn’t licensed for streaming here. I can see the tracks on Spotify with “Show Unavailable Tracks” toggled, but if I try to play them, I’ll get an “unavailable in your region” error. It doesn’t really matter which service I use: if it’s region-locked in one, it’ll be region-locked in all of them. - Some of the artists I enjoy are indie bands. I can often buy their music on Bandcamp, but it might not be on streaming services. - Some bands have albums and tracks (particularly covers and remixes) that keep running into licensing issues and dropping from streaming services, even if they’re mainstream. - Some bands have older, forgotten albums that are quite good, even if they’re older than me. Unfortunately, if those albums aren’t as popular as their newer works or were demos, good luck getting ahold of them, even if you try to pirate them. - I like the soundtrack and theme song from a movie or video game. Can I stream it? 50/50, regardless of how mainstream it is. How about a more concrete example? Cling to Me by LP. You can find low-quality versions on YouTube, and LP is a songwriter for several modern pop artists[0]—but it’s a demo, so you can’t stream it. You can technically play it in YouTube Music, but the quality is absolutely terrible, probably because the videos are either old or reposted. This is from an artist whose own songs play at my local supermarket, and who wrote music for other mainstream artists. But nope—can’t stream that one. [0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LP_(singer) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LP_(singer) > She has written songs for other artists including Cher, Rihanna, the Backstreet Boys, Leona Lewis, Mylène Farmer, Céline Dion and Christina Aguilera.
- matkoniecz 6y ago> Then what? Have an mp3 collection that you actually control?
- zenexer 6y agoExactly. The parent argued against having an MP3 library.
- m0zg 6y agoNot even a millenial, and I still subscribe to Apple Music, even though I have an extensive ripped FLAC collection and there are maybe 2-3 CDs a year that come out that I will listen to more than once (which I buy anyway).
- pacifika 6y agoIn the meantime everyone is at home listening to streamers who DJ using their local music library.
- Guthur 6y agoFor me I tried the youtube music, found that it was heel bent on playing me videos I didn't want to watch and immediately switched to Amazon prime. I'm sure you can avoid the music video aspect but I could be bothered figuring that out after enforced disruption to my app habits and so just changed provider.
- Cloudef 6y agoI was using it. I still want to own the shit I buy. I don't want to subscribe to a service just to rent shit. I know where subscribe cancer eventually goes.. To exclusives and to having to subscribe to tons of services just to get the shit you want. And of course you have to have a internet connection and what not. I just want to buy the music and have it on my device. My google play music yesterday killswitched itself so I installed "simple music player" from f-droid and took my google play purchases from google takeout. Good riddance. Also youtube music absolute sucks with its sound quality and ads.
- jjav 6y ago> I know where subscribe cancer eventually goes.. Also, to content disappearing entirely for random reasons.
- shrimpx 6y agoYouTube music is terrible. I have no idea who the target market is supposed to be. It mixes in the subset of YouTube that is music, but not all of it, and stripped of YouTube context such as comments.
- majewsky 6y ago> I installed "simple music player" from f-droid Since we're talking F-Droid, I can highly recommend "Vanilla Music" for a plain "play a bunch of MP3s" experience. My favorite feature is that you can set it to refuse playing music on the phone speakers (only on headphones).
- Cloudef 6y agoBtw, google takeout sucks too. Why are they using .zip files? If you really must use .zip files, at least encode the contents in UTF-8...
- Yetanfou 6y agoGet you off my farm and leave me to sit in my rocking chair at 55, you young'un. Pfah, youth these days, when we was young we had to stream our bits over barbed wire fences through thunderstorms and solar flares, both ways. Oh, by the way: frank@serve:~$ find /mnt/audio/music -type f|wc -l 134594 The result of "Waste not, want not", i.e. save what you like for later, times might not always be good. I started doing this with a cassette recorder, finger passed over the Record button for when some song came on the radio (a box with electricals in it and a wire sticking out, you turned a knob and music came out, for free!) but graduated to the intertubes when they became a thing around 1993. In other words, both young and old keep local collections, this is not purely an age thing. My 16yo daughter uses both our own library as well as commercial streaming services, my 9yo daughter (who doesn't have a phone yet and will not get one for a while) primarily uses our own library. Just like some folks are preppers who keep enough food and necessities for a few months to years while others live from one Über-eats to the next, so do some curate their own library (etc.) while others rely purely on commercial services.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- krzyk 6y ago> Sorry TC the reality is barely anyone but aging millennials are keeping 20k songs around in mp3 format. Google Music wasn't for keeping 20k songs in mp3 format. It was a streaming service, that just allowed uploading your own songs. But e.g. I used it as a music streaming service which was superior to Youtube Music which I use now (Youtube music has just one advantage - it has dark mode, but one that doesn't care about color-blind people, e.g. turning on shuffle is for me invisible :( ).
- nix23 6y ago>But more so than that no one at google wants to work on a product no one uses. You won’t get promoted that way. That sounds like a terrible way to lead a company.
- spaceflunky 6y agoSad but true. A lot of great ideas at tech companies get thrown by the wayside because aspiring PMs and Eng leads don't think those project will get attention. Im talking businesses that are easily $xxM ARR businesses if you were run them alone. The FAANGs just dont care. But there have been a lot of startups that started this way, so the downstream effect is that the smart people will just leave and do that project on their own and reap the profits. The other way of looking at is that it is a misalignment of resources for FAANGs to work on small projects. They have so much power and resources, that they should probably leave the small projects to the smaller companies and focus on solving big problems others would not have the resources to tackle.
- szszrk 6y agoGoogle Music was crap service from the very start. It was clunky and heavy on all platforms, could not distinguish completely different artists from each other because they thought band names are unique and music range was poor compared to competition. When google launched GM, Deezer was already way better option. Ability to store your own music was an attempt to create a killer feature they needed to keep that service running at all. Google is teaching us the same thing over and over: - Scale over user comfort, general usability and features. - What you see is what you get. No evolution for next decade. - Service may be closed sooner and it will be pain in the ass to transfer to "the next new thing". - The "next new thing" might not be around when the previous one is shut down already.
- amiga-workbench 6y agoI'm pretty glad they gave me the push. The new YouTube music app is utter junk, it's been replaced with Tidal and Jellyfin. Having a self hosted media library has been great so far. The only annoyance is my garbage Virgin media modem dropping offline every few days, cutting me off from my home server while I'm out and about.
- 0ld 6y ago> keeping 20k songs around in mp3 format. Google killed the service because no one really uses it that's why they proposed to (and i did) move my 35k songs to ytmusic? in any case, this all downgraded my experience so significantly (due to no background playing, shitty interface etc) that i even considered starting paying for it. maybe that was actually their point. but thanks, google, not today - since i work from home due to covid anyway, i have no need for it anymore
- syshum 6y agoNo Kidding, Get with the program millennial's, We Ancient GenXer's have been self hosting since 1999
- ghaff 6y agoI have a big music library (and am older than millennials). But, honestly, curating it better has been on my "someday" list to do for years. And I honestly doubt if I would have systematically created one from scratch if I didn't already own a big physical music library and streaming services were readily available.
- strawberrypuree 6y ago>Sorry TC the reality is barely anyone but aging millennials are keeping 20k songs around in mp3 format. And yet iTunes Match remains in service.