9 ms·

Google Play Music was extremely album-focused, but their move over to YouTube Music has basically scrapped that. GPM even let you modify the metadata for album

Google Play Music was extremely album-focused, but their move over to YouTube Music has basically scrapped that. GPM even let you modify the metadata for albums; I had used this to strip out things like "(2020 Remaster Special Gold Edition)" from album names, and to cut "bonus" tracks off of albums (nothing as fun as playing an album and then getting a two hour long spoken word interview with Quincy Jones), and finally to reorganize my classical music so that the artist was the composer and the orchestra/performer name was just munged into the album title (obviously deeper nesting would have been better, but this worked well). Now with YTM even browsing by artist is nearly impossible, and when you do, it doesn't display the albums by that artist that you've added to your collection, it just displays everything, so there's no real way to avoid seeing 20 copies of the same album remastered at different times mixed in with "pop rock of the 90s" collections. It's just dreadful. All I want is a music service that lets me access an unlimited virtual store and bring whatever content I want and organize it recursively by tags (i.e. when I navigate to "artist" it presents me with the ability to narrow my search by "composer" or "album" or whatever). I stick with YTM mostly because it came with free ad-free YouTube. There is no public API to talk to the service, though, so I can't even build my own frontend (although there are numerous hacks, most of which involve checking your plaintext password into a git repository, which of course means compromising your gmail account which is essentially the end of the world).

willis936 5y ago
I've been on the same journey. My plan is to self host plex. Cache the music I want, VPN/stream when I want to add more to the cache.
- kaladin-jasnah 5y ago
  I have Qobuz combined with mpd (there's a plugin). It's not the cheapest but it's decent for what you get and the UI is simple and doesn't get in your way. My only regret is that it doesn't have lyrics AFAIK.
echelon 5y ago
The degradation of Google Play Music into YouTube Music has to be one of the most disappointing product merges in history. All of the power functionality disappeared. I can't even find the music I want anymore without great effort. As a consequence, I'm listening to my favorite artists less frequently, and haven't even thought about concerts, festivals, albums, etc. A dumb but rich tabular music + metadata store would be a game changer. Add in tags and multi-dimensional ranking, and I'd be in heaven. Add an API, and I'll gladly pay $50/mo. I want iTunes 1.0, but with the ability to sync between the cloud and all of my devices. With smart playlists that can operate over my tags and ratings. That's it. No music videos, no real need for album art or lyrics, but certainly no UI removed for simplicity or dumbing down the product. I want to index and traverse my music in my own way.
- sylens 5y ago
  I really loved GPM too and them merging it with YouTube Music pushed me to Spotify
- Arrath 5y ago
  I'm glad I'm not alone in lamenting the demise of Google Play Music.
- AlexandrB 5y ago
  Seems like something similar happened to Google Pay[1] as well. With a few exceptions Google seems to suck at discerning between good and bad products. It'll shelve the likes of Reader or neuter Google Play Music, but insist on pushing garbage like G+. [1] https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2021/03/the-new-google-pay-repeats-all-the-same-mistakes-of-google-allo/ https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2021/03/the-new-google-pay-r...
  - Talanes 5y ago
    To be fair, Reader and Google Play Music did both outlast G+, so it's not like the garbage fairs any better.
  - Yhippa 5y ago
heavyset_go 5y ago
YouTube Music is the reason I moved over to self-hosted Jellyfin to host my music collection.
- apocalyptic0n3 5y ago
  Same here, except I went the Plex/Plexamp route. Terrific experience.
- _jal 5y ago
  To anyone else who still wants to own their own music, I highly recommend looking at Jriver Media Center. Not free, and it is a bit of a strange application at first. But I find it extremely capable and flexible, and because it is just a player, they have an interest in catering to you instead of the copyright rentiers. I use it with my main stereo and stream music to network players in other rooms. (It does video stuff too, I don't use any of that.) No connection to them other than as a happy customer. https://jriver.com/ https://jriver.com/
- NewJazz 5y ago
  Where do you source your originals? Bandcamp is my go to, but not all artists publish there. Amazon often has physical CDs and MP3s for artists, but I have not patronized them for such goods (yet). My process for downloading from Bandcamp, extracting the files, and syncing them to the storage could be automated a bit more I think.
  - heavyset_go 5y ago
    Bandcamp, and for old/obscure things I can't buy elsewhere, SoulSeek. edit: forgot about discogs.com
  - kuschku 5y ago
    Bandcamp and CDs, the best way to get music in proper formats.
- CameronNemo 5y ago
  Another option is Funkwhale. I've not tried it, but it seems cool. https://funkwhale.audio/apps/ https://funkwhale.audio/apps/
Thaxll 5y ago
It's really a weird merge, I browse youtube and I see the music I like from Youtube Music there because musics are somehow fetched from YT and not from a different place ( like it was on Google music ). It seems that if the music is officialy available on Youtube, Youtube Music fetch the music from there, if not it's using an internal catalog.
- pavel_lishin 5y ago
  And vice versa - I'll try to look through my playlists, and I get a mix of my music ones, and my YouTube ones. Just a baffling design choice.
- judge2020 5y ago
  In my experience you can open most all videos categorized as 'music' from YPP creators, but the 'songs' section of search results is effectively the Google Play Music/actually-published songs index.
- JeremyNT 5y ago
  I still pay for it... but only barely. It's a sad shadow of GPM, which was much more to my liking. If you want to avoid their awful YTMusic web UI there are options. There's a decent, standalone, GUI YTM application for KDE [0] which I've used (sadly it doesn't support logins, but if you just want a player it works well enough). There's also a plugin for Mopidy [1] that lets you listen through your MPD / snapcast [2] server, but that's more fiddly. [0] https://apps.kde.org/audiotube/ https://apps.kde.org/audiotube/ [1] https://github.com/OzymandiasTheGreat/mopidy-ytmusic https://github.com/OzymandiasTheGreat/mopidy-ytmusic [2] https://github.com/badaix/snapcast https://github.com/badaix/snapcast
germinalphrase 5y ago
Everything is worse under Youtube Music. Embarrassing product.
- kingcharles 5y ago
  I have to disagree. One of the reasons I use YouTube Music is because their search includes all the random music uploaded to youtube.com. This means that a lot of really rare tracks that YTM never received officially from the labels can be integrated into your library. I guess YTM then tries to sort out the royalty issues as they do through youtube.com.
  - packetlost 5y ago
    YTM is objectively inferior to GPM in every way except library size and some details that only YouTube/Google have to worry about. The apps are buggy as fuck and have little more than "radio" features and a (crappy) search bar. Playlists are intermingled with youtube video playlists and have no search and only rudimentary sorting, viewing albums is a pain, finding your own music is a minimum of 3 button clicks, and the app flat out does not work half of the time.
matwood 5y ago
I was very happy with GPM, and was a long time user since the beta (7.99/mo intro pricing was also nice). Then they stopped updating GPM and started pushing YTM. It was terrible so I went to Apple Music (at the time it had recently come out), and have been there ever since.
stavros 5y ago
Remember Grooveshark?
- bsanr2 5y ago
  Grooveshark was better than any other service - including Pandora - at exposing me to music that I wasn't expecting to love but did anyway.
  - busterarm 5y ago
    Grooveshark and the early years at Last.fm... Gosh I miss those.
  - holler 5y ago
    Grooveshark and later Rdio were my favorite music sites ever... best UI and easy to use
commandlinefan 5y ago
> an unlimited virtual store and bring whatever content I want and organize it recursively by tags Isn't that what Spotify and Pandora are?
- andrewla 5y ago
  I've never used Pandora in a paid mode, so I can't speak to that. Spotify has some features that map to this, but is way more artist focused than album focused. When you click on an artist, you get the artist's page, and navigating to the albums that you have added by that artist is nearly impossible. That is, there's no way to engage hierarchically -- to say "I want to listen to a Neil Young album that is in my collection". You have to either decide on the album from memory and just find it, or you have to go to the artist and hope that the album you like is one of the "recommended" or "hot" ones by Neil Young.
  - hnrodey 5y ago
    Create a playlist from the album so that it's in your "collection" (of playlists). That's only way I know how to accomplish.
standardUser 5y ago
Google Play was ideal because I could upload any of my own music and it was part of my library, accessible anywhere in the world. Does any service like that still exist? I'm stuck with Spotify, which lacks dozens and dozens of albums that are important to me, and it won't let me upload them myself.
- MBCook 5y ago
  Apple Music does.
- morsch 5y ago
  Spotify actually lets you do that, so you're in luck. Add local files on your desktop to a playlist, download the playlist on your mobile device, done. I'm using the feature, it works. Though it does not work with my "Spotify remote play" (or whatever they're calling it) kitchen radio. The feature is so niche, I half expect them to drop it without a word in any given update. https://community.spotify.com/t5/Android/Play-quot-local-files-quot-on-my-mobile-device/td-p/80481 https://community.spotify.com/t5/Android/Play-quot-local-fil...
  - erdaltoprak 5y ago
    Hi, I was trying to explain that in the blog post too, in Apple Music your own added songs are uploaded and act as any other streaming song and I think it’s pretty amazing, also the fact that your song now has all the inherited features like Siri/Spotlight search!
    - sorenjan 5y ago
      I don't use Apple music myself, but I've heard that it doesn't actually use your songs but uses song name matching which sometimes gives you censored versions of explicit songs. Is this true? I remember when I used Google Play Music and it kept the AOL sound in "my" copy of a certain Tatu song, so that was definitely streaming the uploaded song.
      - 5y ago
mayneack 5y ago
Like several other comments here, I had the same experience as you and decided to go with plex. What no one mentioned is that plex allows you to add a tidal library in addition to your self hosted content. It's not a perfectly seamless experience because you have to mark tidal albums one at a time to add to your self hosted library and I don't think you can cache them offline on plexamp (for android at least), but it's the best I've found. I'm hoping to give Roon a try someday, but plex works well enough that I haven't quite gotten up the activation energy: https://roonlabs.com/downloads https://roonlabs.com/downloads
- busterarm 5y ago
  I found Plex fairly useless for managing my music library but throwing everything into my Synology's Audio Station and connecting via DS Audio has been amazing.
  - amanzi 5y ago
    The new PlexAmp music player from Plex has revitalised my music library on Plex. I would have agreed with your statement prior to using PlexAmp, but I now listen to way more of my old music library than before.
    - ascagnel_ 5y ago
      Plex can also handle audiobooks reasonably well if you play them with the app Prologue. https://prologue.audio/ https://prologue.audio/
    - oregano 5y ago
      I somehow have completely missed the announcement on PlexAmp. I’ve just been using their standard ‘Plex’ iOS app all this time. I just now downloaded PlexAmp and it looks great. I love to rate and add tags to my music while listening so I hope this app provides a good UX for that (in addition to the obvious needs like sorting and organizing). In terms of initial impression it looks waaaay shinier than their standard app I’ve been using all this time. Excited to start using it more.
kall 5y ago
This is what the article is about anyway but I suppose you don't use apple devices so you are not in a position to use Apple Music fully? It sounds like you might like it, because it can do all that. I'm not sure about your exact navigation idea but Apple Music has a JS api for web applications as well as "local" OS level API on iOS, so there are blessed third party interfaces. On iOS, there are really polished and customizable full alternative clients like Marvis Pro. On iOS and macOS, you can also "end user program" Apple Music via Shortcuts. I have accomplished a lot with that, building an interface for browsing playlists as album collections, grouping those playlists and workflows for moving stuff between them. On the web it looks more like some toy projects (still full clients tho). There is the official web app and an android app, but I think you can only get to the full metadata management power on a Mac (because it still caries most of the iTunes legacy there).

willis936 5y ago

I've been on the same journey. My plan is to self host plex. Cache the music I want, VPN/stream when I want to add more to the cache.

kaladin-jasnah 5y ago
I have Qobuz combined with mpd (there's a plugin). It's not the cheapest but it's decent for what you get and the UI is simple and doesn't get in your way. My only regret is that it doesn't have lyrics AFAIK.

echelon 5y ago

The degradation of Google Play Music into YouTube Music has to be one of the most disappointing product merges in history. All of the power functionality disappeared. I can't even find the music I want anymore without great effort. As a consequence, I'm listening to my favorite artists less frequently, and haven't even thought about concerts, festivals, albums, etc. A dumb but rich tabular music + metadata store would be a game changer. Add in tags and multi-dimensional ranking, and I'd be in heaven. Add an API, and I'll gladly pay $50/mo. I want iTunes 1.0, but with the ability to sync between the cloud and all of my devices. With smart playlists that can operate over my tags and ratings. That's it. No music videos, no real need for album art or lyrics, but certainly no UI removed for simplicity or dumbing down the product. I want to index and traverse my music in my own way.

sylens 5y ago
I really loved GPM too and them merging it with YouTube Music pushed me to Spotify
Arrath 5y ago
I'm glad I'm not alone in lamenting the demise of Google Play Music.
AlexandrB 5y ago
Seems like something similar happened to Google Pay[1] as well. With a few exceptions Google seems to suck at discerning between good and bad products. It'll shelve the likes of Reader or neuter Google Play Music, but insist on pushing garbage like G+. [1] https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2021/03/the-new-google-pay-repeats-all-the-same-mistakes-of-google-allo/ https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2021/03/the-new-google-pay-r...
- Talanes 5y ago
  To be fair, Reader and Google Play Music did both outlast G+, so it's not like the garbage fairs any better.
- Yhippa 5y ago

heavyset_go 5y ago

YouTube Music is the reason I moved over to self-hosted Jellyfin to host my music collection.

apocalyptic0n3 5y ago
Same here, except I went the Plex/Plexamp route. Terrific experience.
_jal 5y ago
To anyone else who still wants to own their own music, I highly recommend looking at Jriver Media Center. Not free, and it is a bit of a strange application at first. But I find it extremely capable and flexible, and because it is just a player, they have an interest in catering to you instead of the copyright rentiers. I use it with my main stereo and stream music to network players in other rooms. (It does video stuff too, I don't use any of that.) No connection to them other than as a happy customer. https://jriver.com/ https://jriver.com/
NewJazz 5y ago
Where do you source your originals? Bandcamp is my go to, but not all artists publish there. Amazon often has physical CDs and MP3s for artists, but I have not patronized them for such goods (yet). My process for downloading from Bandcamp, extracting the files, and syncing them to the storage could be automated a bit more I think.
- heavyset_go 5y ago
  Bandcamp, and for old/obscure things I can't buy elsewhere, SoulSeek. edit: forgot about discogs.com
- kuschku 5y ago
  Bandcamp and CDs, the best way to get music in proper formats.
CameronNemo 5y ago
Another option is Funkwhale. I've not tried it, but it seems cool. https://funkwhale.audio/apps/ https://funkwhale.audio/apps/

Thaxll 5y ago

It's really a weird merge, I browse youtube and I see the music I like from Youtube Music there because musics are somehow fetched from YT and not from a different place ( like it was on Google music ). It seems that if the music is officialy available on Youtube, Youtube Music fetch the music from there, if not it's using an internal catalog.

pavel_lishin 5y ago
And vice versa - I'll try to look through my playlists, and I get a mix of my music ones, and my YouTube ones. Just a baffling design choice.
judge2020 5y ago
In my experience you can open most all videos categorized as 'music' from YPP creators, but the 'songs' section of search results is effectively the Google Play Music/actually-published songs index.
JeremyNT 5y ago
I still pay for it... but only barely. It's a sad shadow of GPM, which was much more to my liking. If you want to avoid their awful YTMusic web UI there are options. There's a decent, standalone, GUI YTM application for KDE [0] which I've used (sadly it doesn't support logins, but if you just want a player it works well enough). There's also a plugin for Mopidy [1] that lets you listen through your MPD / snapcast [2] server, but that's more fiddly. [0] https://apps.kde.org/audiotube/ https://apps.kde.org/audiotube/ [1] https://github.com/OzymandiasTheGreat/mopidy-ytmusic https://github.com/OzymandiasTheGreat/mopidy-ytmusic [2] https://github.com/badaix/snapcast https://github.com/badaix/snapcast

germinalphrase 5y ago

Everything is worse under Youtube Music. Embarrassing product.

kingcharles 5y ago
I have to disagree. One of the reasons I use YouTube Music is because their search includes all the random music uploaded to youtube.com. This means that a lot of really rare tracks that YTM never received officially from the labels can be integrated into your library. I guess YTM then tries to sort out the royalty issues as they do through youtube.com.
- packetlost 5y ago
  YTM is objectively inferior to GPM in every way except library size and some details that only YouTube/Google have to worry about. The apps are buggy as fuck and have little more than "radio" features and a (crappy) search bar. Playlists are intermingled with youtube video playlists and have no search and only rudimentary sorting, viewing albums is a pain, finding your own music is a minimum of 3 button clicks, and the app flat out does not work half of the time.

matwood 5y ago

I was very happy with GPM, and was a long time user since the beta (7.99/mo intro pricing was also nice). Then they stopped updating GPM and started pushing YTM. It was terrible so I went to Apple Music (at the time it had recently come out), and have been there ever since.

stavros 5y ago

Remember Grooveshark?

bsanr2 5y ago
Grooveshark was better than any other service - including Pandora - at exposing me to music that I wasn't expecting to love but did anyway.
- busterarm 5y ago
  Grooveshark and the early years at Last.fm... Gosh I miss those.
- holler 5y ago
  Grooveshark and later Rdio were my favorite music sites ever... best UI and easy to use

commandlinefan 5y ago

> an unlimited virtual store and bring whatever content I want and organize it recursively by tags Isn't that what Spotify and Pandora are?

andrewla 5y ago
I've never used Pandora in a paid mode, so I can't speak to that. Spotify has some features that map to this, but is way more artist focused than album focused. When you click on an artist, you get the artist's page, and navigating to the albums that you have added by that artist is nearly impossible. That is, there's no way to engage hierarchically -- to say "I want to listen to a Neil Young album that is in my collection". You have to either decide on the album from memory and just find it, or you have to go to the artist and hope that the album you like is one of the "recommended" or "hot" ones by Neil Young.
- hnrodey 5y ago
  Create a playlist from the album so that it's in your "collection" (of playlists). That's only way I know how to accomplish.

standardUser 5y ago

Google Play was ideal because I could upload any of my own music and it was part of my library, accessible anywhere in the world. Does any service like that still exist? I'm stuck with Spotify, which lacks dozens and dozens of albums that are important to me, and it won't let me upload them myself.

MBCook 5y ago
Apple Music does.
morsch 5y ago
Spotify actually lets you do that, so you're in luck. Add local files on your desktop to a playlist, download the playlist on your mobile device, done. I'm using the feature, it works. Though it does not work with my "Spotify remote play" (or whatever they're calling it) kitchen radio. The feature is so niche, I half expect them to drop it without a word in any given update. https://community.spotify.com/t5/Android/Play-quot-local-files-quot-on-my-mobile-device/td-p/80481 https://community.spotify.com/t5/Android/Play-quot-local-fil...
- erdaltoprak 5y ago
  Hi, I was trying to explain that in the blog post too, in Apple Music your own added songs are uploaded and act as any other streaming song and I think it’s pretty amazing, also the fact that your song now has all the inherited features like Siri/Spotlight search!
  - sorenjan 5y ago
    I don't use Apple music myself, but I've heard that it doesn't actually use your songs but uses song name matching which sometimes gives you censored versions of explicit songs. Is this true? I remember when I used Google Play Music and it kept the AOL sound in "my" copy of a certain Tatu song, so that was definitely streaming the uploaded song.
    - 5y ago

mayneack 5y ago

Like several other comments here, I had the same experience as you and decided to go with plex. What no one mentioned is that plex allows you to add a tidal library in addition to your self hosted content. It's not a perfectly seamless experience because you have to mark tidal albums one at a time to add to your self hosted library and I don't think you can cache them offline on plexamp (for android at least), but it's the best I've found. I'm hoping to give Roon a try someday, but plex works well enough that I haven't quite gotten up the activation energy: https://roonlabs.com/downloads https://roonlabs.com/downloads

busterarm 5y ago
I found Plex fairly useless for managing my music library but throwing everything into my Synology's Audio Station and connecting via DS Audio has been amazing.
- amanzi 5y ago
  The new PlexAmp music player from Plex has revitalised my music library on Plex. I would have agreed with your statement prior to using PlexAmp, but I now listen to way more of my old music library than before.
  - ascagnel_ 5y ago
    Plex can also handle audiobooks reasonably well if you play them with the app Prologue. https://prologue.audio/ https://prologue.audio/
  - oregano 5y ago
    I somehow have completely missed the announcement on PlexAmp. I’ve just been using their standard ‘Plex’ iOS app all this time. I just now downloaded PlexAmp and it looks great. I love to rate and add tags to my music while listening so I hope this app provides a good UX for that (in addition to the obvious needs like sorting and organizing). In terms of initial impression it looks waaaay shinier than their standard app I’ve been using all this time. Excited to start using it more.

kall 5y ago

This is what the article is about anyway but I suppose you don't use apple devices so you are not in a position to use Apple Music fully? It sounds like you might like it, because it can do all that. I'm not sure about your exact navigation idea but Apple Music has a JS api for web applications as well as "local" OS level API on iOS, so there are blessed third party interfaces. On iOS, there are really polished and customizable full alternative clients like Marvis Pro. On iOS and macOS, you can also "end user program" Apple Music via Shortcuts. I have accomplished a lot with that, building an interface for browsing playlists as album collections, grouping those playlists and workflows for moving stuff between them. On the web it looks more like some toy projects (still full clients tho). There is the official web app and an android app, but I think you can only get to the full metadata management power on a Mac (because it still caries most of the iTunes legacy there).