Remember when Google Music hadn't been killed yet...?

It was the best music service there was imo.

Now it's buying my music and Jellyfinning it up.

Yes I too am "buying" music and adding it to my Emby and Music Assistant servers.
- Why emby over jf?
I currently use strawberry on my PC for most music, and still am searching for a FOSS android app. I thought it was Mucke, but it doesn't see more than half my tracks for some reason.
- Metro is pretty good, especially if you liked google music
Why not use Navidrome. It supports the SubSonic API so there's a wider array of clients you can use, and it has a pretty good web UI.
- Because Symfonium and Tauon exist.
- +1 for Navidrome. I switched over to it over a year ago and it provides everything I had with subsonic before subsonic crashed hard one day and I decided to find a more up to date application. I pair it with the android app Symfonium and I feel like I am using a high end streaming service.

Yes Plexamp gang! I find the transition works for me too. I have a raspberry pi that just works with all my music on there. Paid the lifetime Plex fee too because I use it constantly.
- PlexAmp member reporting in.
I'm that regard, Google does a lot to propagate the use of free software and self hosting.
I really liked them at one time.

Let's all of us stop making the mistake of trusting big tech. They always make a good product you actually want then rugpull once you're settled. YouTube music is passably okay but there's a dozen bugs and issues that I'm still struggling with that didn't exist in Google music

The UI/UX is absolute trash for uploaded music compared to play music.
- The algorithms are worse too

They decided which one is better for them.
Honest question as someone who didn't get the chance to use Google Music and now uses YouTube Music: what are the downsides of YTM? What was Google Music better at?
- I can't speak specifically to YouTube Music. But Google Music allowed you to upload I think it was 50,000 of your own songs. And at the time it supported really good audio quality.
  The app was also simple and clean. I don't remember seeing all kinds of ads or suggestions for featured artists, podcasts, etc. Spotify seems a lot busier than what I remember with Google Music. That being said I mostly used Google Music to stream my personal library.

I'll die on the hill that GPM was and still is the best music service I ever used. I don't think I ever had a single recommendation that wasn't on point for me. The service worked flawless and the app was easy to use. When we got the notice our hearts sank. Spotify doesn't even compare .

Good call, recommendations have only gotten worse with subsequent iterations. I am glad they added gapless playback though, the first few versions had a tiny pause between songs which was hella obvious on stuff like Pink Floyd.
Same! I still keep the icon on my phone to remind me of what we lost.
Plex Amp?

Does anyone else remember when Gmail was invite only and you only got like 10 invites?

It's how I snagged a "firstname.lastname" address. No numbers or anything! All the other people with my exact name out there can fuck off!
- And as a bonus you snagged firstnamelastname without realising.
  This alone makes Gmail a better service than most providers. All of the similar but different address confusions avoided.
  It really should be standard practice.
- Yeah I snagged one too; but all the people with that name seem to have made variations of it, and when they give it out, either they forget their own email address or the person they give it to just mishears and simplifies to first name.lastname. Needless to say I receive a lot of junk intended for other people.
- I have a first and last name email on Gmail and I had some dbag email me telling me if I didn’t hand over the email to him he was going to sign my account up for every spam service he could find also claimed he was going to hack my account but the brute force attempts and phishing emails didn’t work. This was a few years ago and I still get a ton of spam on that account and Google doesn’t have a solution for it so the account just sits there unused. I will take that email to my grave before I let some jackass in the internet get what he wants.

Ah yes, Google Music was nice.

I'm so happy to still have my trusty iPod Classic 128Gb. I have a little Bluetooth dongle for its headphone jack (remember those?) that pairs with my hearing aids. All my tunes and podcasts in my pocket, no phone signal required.

Recently I downloaded iTunes again because I'm trying to consolidate my music library/listening history from all my old services and get them on Jellyfin.
And...I'd honestly forgotten how legitimately good a piece of software iTunes is. Not perfect, obviously, but I'd forgotten what it was like to have sophisticated music management tools. Just the sheer amount of options and tools to sort and manage the list, to be able to edit the properties, etc.
Then you look at modern streaming apps and it's all just...terrible. The user is completely neutered. You can't do even half as much with them. Things are just straight up hidden or don't exist anymore, you have very few methods of controlling how things are organized or sorted, etc.
"Modern" design principles seem to be "you can just deal with using the app the way we think you should, we won't give you the ability to make it your own".
That's what made Google Play Music so good: it was that beautiful sweet spot between the useful tool of iTunes-esc music management and the convenience of the streaming services. I didn't feel like my hands were tied when using it like I do with Spotify.
- I only tried Spotify once. I read a reference to a song I wanted to listen to but didn't own. Searched for it on Spotify, found it, and clicked to play it. It played something else entirely, not even by the same artist. I tried a few times, but it wouldn't play that song or anything by that artist. I guess I just don't understand Spotify?
- Spicetify helps ease the pain a little bit

Remember when the Intenet made you optimistic? That's why I think these posts gut me so much. Because it doesn't do that anymore.

Anyway off to continue doom scrolling.

"The internet will bring us all together! It will democratize truth and information!" Was the manta of the 2000s.
20 years later and the exact opposite happened.
- to be fair i would say that the internet largely has made information significantly more democratic & accessible. truth, not so much...
  although i definitely do count the fact that you need to know how to spot & deal with misinformation and especially disinformation and differentiate it from valid information in order to safely use the internet, as a very big accessibility problem currently. Most people aren't growing up learning that on their own, and it's certainly not well taught.

terrible. I thought I would never need a copy of my music files again - They're uploaded to Google so it's all good.

When it crashed, it was an extreme hassle to download the several gigs, I ended up storing them on a phone temporarily, which then died and is likely not recoverable. I lost some rare and unique recordings like the music from my old band that I recorded.

Maintaining this would have been a pittance for Google.

EDIT: See replies below for the solution. Thanks Lemmy!

I thought all Google Music was transferred to YouTube Music. You might still have those files in your library.
- Thanks! it turns out that it is all there!
  I never bothered to setup a YT Music account, so I never realized that the uploaded music was still available. I know this is a very niche problem, but just in case anyone is searching and comes across this:
  Yes, Google Music uploads are saved in your YouTube Music files. You already have a Google account, so you can set it up with the same login to gain access to the files.
  On desktop, open "Library" on the left -> select "Uploads" tab at the top.
  Sort by "Album," "Artist," or "Song" to see the entire library.
  When searching, etc., it will default back to the YT Music streaming service. Manually select the "Uploads" tab after each operation.
  It is also possible to download your music library (although not individual songs, etc.) from YT Music, although it is not obvious.
  Navigate to https://takeout.google.com/ while logged into the same Google account.
  Click on "Deselect all" (unless you wish to download ALL of your google related data.
  Select "YouTube and YouTube Music" at the bottom of the list
  Click "All YouTube data included," then select "music-uploads" as well as "music-library-songs" (if you have any music acquired through Google)
  Follow the prompts to receive your files. You can choose to repeat this process as a periodic backup, or a one time download as a .zip (or set of .zip files). You can download them to your PC via email link, or you can have them directly transferred to another cloud service (Box, Dropbox, Google Drive, and OneDrive as of now)
  This process can take a while, but in my case I received the download links within a couple minutes (about 30 GB).
  Good luck, and enjoy!

Man GPM was the jam.. found so many new artists with that service. I was an early adopter and gladly paid my monthly fee.

And then YouTube music happened.... the bastards.

I rolled my own Plex server and am on plexamp for music now.

I'll never go back to streaming.

25K tracks on my Plex server, and Plexamp is the best music player I've ever used. Having started with WinAmp, I've been through quite a few.

GPM was my jam. It had simple features that I would later take for granted, like remembering the exact track I left off on, and the number of times I've played a particular track. I only keep YTM because it comes with premium (no ads on YT). The second they separate premium from YTM, I'll drop it.

I used Google Play Music for purchases/online music locker and loved it. I eventually became that idiot that never downloaded all their purchases before the switch to Youtube Music happened.

Now I can't even open Youtube Music because it loads up my GPM library and rubs in my face that I essentially paid to have a bunch of music pre-listed for streaming that now has unskippable ads that I can't listen to unless I leave my screen on and unlocked.

I was too broke and slammed to get a new external drive in order to get all my music downloaded and saved from GPM at the time of the switch, but I look back on it and think about how I could've skipped meals and stuff to have gotten something with just enough space to save that music.

Your music is likely still there if you grab it with Takeout. Mine was. The only problem: one flat folder. I spent weeks with Picard working out which tracks where what by title and acoustic ID. So, not great, but I got back my own music files for some things I'd forgotten completely.
- I just did it and it worked! It's definitely a jumble of music files but it's all there, every last bit. Thank you, thank you so much. This has been weighing on my mind for so long, there are so many songs I can put back on my offline playlists now that I have them again. You're the best!

It was the best! GPM's demise was an abomination.

When google music was consolidated into YouTube music it was a slightly worse experience, but mostly it somehow just ruined all of my playlists and made them unusable both on music and YouTube.

Slightly? I hated it and switched to Spotify
- Me too. I would've probably used Google Play Music to the end of my days but the transition to Youtube Music was so good awful I cancelled and switched to Spotify within a couple of days.
- I couldn't justify the cost of Spotify when I'm still paying for YouTube premium (and have no plans to quit) and at the end of the day it still isn't GPM
From what I can tell, the core issue with YouTube music is that it is restricted to the same API end points as default YouTube. Their api for playlist management just sucks and a lot of client side caching and workarounds are required to make it at all feel okay to use.
- True random is hidden. They auto play videos and/or rape my data with downloads when I specifically tell it not to.

Yup, it was one of the worst "someone's getting promo and the users are getting screwed" Google decisions.

Anyone remember this list?

https://www.reddit.com/r/googleplaymusic/comments/icmwdf/one_comprehensive_list_of_youtube_music/

And now almost all of Google's "offerings" are enshittified to no end. 🤬

Oh yes, the enshittification of music streaming.

To be fair, most people seem to be fine with a "broadcast radio" type playback, where they want to hear both the music they already know/like, with other music that is at least somewhat similar to it.

A nontrivial number of people are more like you, who want this specific music to be played and nothing more. But that perspective, at least from what I've seen, is not held by the majority of users. So we get random trash thrown in with our personally curated lists of songs and albums.

Catering to the majority is fine, IMO, since that's what will pay the bills. I get it. From a business perspective it makes sense. However, ignoring literally everyone else in the process is not what I would consider to be an acceptable policy. Certainly make the defaults conform to what appeals to the largest number of people, but allow the individual user to customize their experience.

Since companies won't do that, those that want to listen to specific music generally get pushed into having a local music collection, so it behaves in a way that makes sense.

A nontrivial number of people are more like you, who want this specific music to be played and nothing more. But that perspective, at least from what I've seen, is not held by the majority of users. So we get random trash thrown in with our personally curated lists of songs and albums.
I've never had Spotify put anything into my curated playlists. They only play the music on the playlist.

This and Zune were peak music.

I argue plexamp is getting close to this as well. Although I use Synfonium with Plex which is also a very smooth experience.
GPM is still untouched though. Even if was a rollercoaster waiting for a new client just to have YTM end everything we liked about it.
- Where do you find the music to add to it? YouTube rips?

I would give anything to get back the I’m Feeling Lucky button for music. It generated so many fantastic spontaneous playlists.

A good alternative for people who still like streaming music. I highly recommend the testimonials section https://nuclear.js.org/

I like the testimonials
- I especially like the last one.

Too soon, man, too soon.

Been rocking a real mp3 player with a metal shell for years now. Nothing quite like having a dedicated device you curate yourself. The last time I used spotify was 2016

If youtube-dl/yt-dlp ever stops working im in trouble

Check out iBroadcast -- it's like the old Google Music, upload your own stuff, play it wherever.

Best music platform ever, and probably forever with the way things are going.

I'm just going to plug iBroadcast to everyone in this thread. It's everything good about Google Music but without the bad stuff.
It has literally everything, and it's cheaper than buying cds. It's not going anywhere anytime soon.

I was a big fan of GrooveShark. I thought they could have transitioned to the paid system, but weren't able to.

Grooveshark was so cool! But I don't think anything could've saved them, it was full of pirated music available for everyone.

I remember a glorious time when Songza existed. It was amazing and I used it every single day. Then the death march began as it was "acquired" by Satan. Satan let it live on for a short while, but after that it "sunsetted" (or whatever other idiotic word they used back then) and Satan killed it.

Oh songza, how I loved thee.

I literally just want to sort my liked music by the number of times it's been played. I really, really miss that feature.

I miss the Zune Pass. From around the same time. Unlimited downloads with DRM and 10 DRM free downloads for 15/month. That was still the era of 99 cent songs so was pretty good deal.

Google music killed songza, I'll never forgive them.

I loved Songza. 😭 To this day, I've not been equally happy with any other offering out there.

I remember.

Yt music does the same thing though, I still send my downloaded songs to it, I really don't get what was so special about the old version.

The previous version was a music management and playback platform that had a store and subscription available. The current version is a subscription-selling platform with rudimentary music management and playback features. You can no longer buy an album, only subscribe. God help you if you want to do anything with playlists.
- Also it uses YouTube's algorithm to do random play based on a song. It sucks so bad it's not even funny. With repeated songs and songs that have nothing to do with the song you started with. And if one of the songs in the list is sorta popular it's just stuck in a loop of the most dreadful popsongs.
  Not to mention wanting to play videos the whole time, where I only want to listen to music as implied by the name YouTube Music. And it mixes your video history on YouTube with the music history, so randomly it will start suggesting songs when you want to watch video.
  It's like someone at YouTube decided that watching videos and listening to music is basically the same thing or close enough. It's utterly moronic.

I'm back on local only as well. Even dipping back into physical media. The thrift stores are my Spotify now.

Yeah, tragic. The queuing behavior was so perfect

My account migrated seamlessly, had no problems at all. I like it still.

Such promise.

Pain

Used to use GPM now use Tidal. Wish it was as cheap as old GPM but the quality is excellent.

Deezer is also pretty good
- Oh that's right forgot about them, should see if their catalogue stacks up well against them

It's right choice from google to discontinued google music because they already have YouTube, so....in the end it kinda redundant to have separate platform IMO

Google Music let you buy and download non DRMd albums, which ladt I checked isn't a thing on YT music.
But unlike YouTube Music, Google Play Music for mostly for buying the music. Very different service.
Nowadays i just use seal + YouTube for music, because some music that i saved from YouTube Music can't be played unless i used YouTube