I used Google Music from it's launch until about early 2019. I switched when it became pretty clear that Google was going to kill it off and switch to YouTube Music. I tried the new service and...
I used Google Music from it's launch until about early 2019. I switched when it became pretty clear that Google was going to kill it off and switch to YouTube Music. I tried the new service and just didn't like it. I really dislike having to keep my music library/history and my YouTube history wrapped up into one list.
I really liked Google Music in the beginning since you could upload your own stuff to fill in the gaps and kept using it since it came with YouTube Red/Premium for free.
The overall UI/experience wasn't great but it was good enough to get by.
In the last two years, I've switched to just using Plex and keeping all of my music stored locally. I went through and spent some money to get the albums that I was missing or only had access to via streaming.
Same exact situation here. Moved over to Plex for my personal library. Also got a TIDAL subscription which has been surprisingly nice. Plex has some TIDAL integration but it's less than excellent....
Same exact situation here. Moved over to Plex for my personal library. Also got a TIDAL subscription which has been surprisingly nice. Plex has some TIDAL integration but it's less than excellent. I don't expect that service to be around forever - at this point I don't really trust any service, but it's nice for discovery.
As for Plex, I'll use it as long as I can, but if it goes away ever, there's plenty of other options, and I still own the library. That's comforting to know.
I spent a lot of time over the past couple of years getting off of as many Google services as I could. Partially for privacy, mostly because I can't trust them to keep a service alive for longer than a couple of years.
Yeah, that's sort of my take, too. I know exactly what I'm getting with a streaming music or video service. Stuff can disappear at any time, they can go under, they can shut it down, etc. So if I...
at this point I don't really trust any service, but it's nice for discovery.
Yeah, that's sort of my take, too. I know exactly what I'm getting with a streaming music or video service. Stuff can disappear at any time, they can go under, they can shut it down, etc. So if I like something, I buy it. But I do love to just listen to an old track I liked as a kid, or something from another country, or other one-off stuff like that. And streaming is great for that. If it's there, I listen to it. If it's not, no big deal. I find that that's most of what I listen to. Either just put on something to have some music going like I used to do with the radio, or look for specific songs that I don't really want to buy, but just want to hear one or two times.
Plex nowadays is incredibly good for that. They even have a really nice separate music player app and it's perfect if you have a pass and want to download things to your phone or stream from your...
Plex nowadays is incredibly good for that. They even have a really nice separate music player app and it's perfect if you have a pass and want to download things to your phone or stream from your server like normal. It's actually what brought me back to Plex, that shit is SO nice on iOS.
I've been away from GPM for a good while since I degoogled and I do not miss it at all. You can pair it with another streaming service if you really need to. I have Spotify through my girlfriend's family plan even though I listen to 90% of my music from my local library and that can occasionally be nice. Though if I didn't mind paying for a service I hardly use, my top choices would be Tidal Hifi, Deezer Hifi, or ideally Qobuz.
I loved my time with GPM but you can fairly easily get an equivalent / superior experience through other stuff nowadays.
Do you use PlexAmp? I think that and Prologue are pretty solid apps. I have everything setup to automatically download and move to my server (with lidarr), but I'm still selective about downloads...
Do you use PlexAmp? I think that and Prologue are pretty solid apps. I have everything setup to automatically download and move to my server (with lidarr), but I'm still selective about downloads and rely on Spotify to supplement with what I don't want to keep locally long-term. I've found a nice balance between streaming and downloading.
Oh yeah, Plexamp was what I was referring to. It's so good, and Prologue looks like it would be similarly good if I cared for audiobooks. As far as the balance goes, I like solutions that let me...
Oh yeah, Plexamp was what I was referring to. It's so good, and Prologue looks like it would be similarly good if I cared for audiobooks.
As far as the balance goes, I like solutions that let me integrate them together. Tauon Music Box is my desktop music player and being able to manage a local library while also integrating tracks from other sources like Plex, airsonic, and Spotify feels nice. I'm pretty stubbornly anti-streaming, but this gives it a bit more utility for me.
Ah gotcha, I have a similar solution through Sonos. It allows me to search both Spotify and Plex regardless of device as long as I'm browsing through the Sonos app. If I'm out of the house and on...
Ah gotcha, I have a similar solution through Sonos. It allows me to search both Spotify and Plex regardless of device as long as I'm browsing through the Sonos app. If I'm out of the house and on mobile though, I have to go into PlexAmp or Spotify separately.
I probably would give up paid streaming altogether if it were just me, but the convenience of sharing a family plan is worth it for us.
What GPM lacked in refined UI it made up for with top-notch selection and far better integration with the rest of their ecosystem, which is pretty important since voice controlled music was the...
What GPM lacked in refined UI it made up for with top-notch selection and far better integration with the rest of their ecosystem, which is pretty important since voice controlled music was the primary use case. Nothing else has filled the void well enough, so I'm returning to self-hosting, this time filling primarily with bandcamp content and self-rips.
I was a GPM user from day one. I loved it, but after using YouTube Music since the beginning I have come to like it even more. The "For You" mix is great, the pre-made playlists are great, and I...
I was a GPM user from day one. I loved it, but after using YouTube Music since the beginning I have come to like it even more. The "For You" mix is great, the pre-made playlists are great, and I love the UI. I mostly listen to playlists, albums, or the personalized mix so it's perfect for me.
Yeah, I already had an iPod since a few years and all my music was in iTunes anyway, so choosing Apple Music as my media player made sense. The Android app also works decently well. I'd recommend it.
Yeah, I already had an iPod since a few years and all my music was in iTunes anyway, so choosing Apple Music as my media player made sense. The Android app also works decently well. I'd recommend it.
Google Play Music was a great product, though I'm honestly okay with it going away. I made a significant effort to de-Google my life a while back and it was one of my last holdouts. I switched...
Google Play Music was a great product, though I'm honestly okay with it going away. I made a significant effort to de-Google my life a while back and it was one of my last holdouts.
I switched over to Astiga as my music platform, which I can recommend with some reservations. It's an app that makes a Subsonic server out of music files hosted on cloud storage. For the average Tildes user who knows about hosting and servers and whatnot, you probably don't need a middleman for that and could just do what Astiga does yourself, but for someone like me who doesn't really have the technical knowhow to make that sort of thing happen, I'm very happy with my "DIY cloud music" setup.
The official app is rough around the edges (though you can also use any Subsonic-compatible app), but its developer is continually working on it, and I suspect might pick up speed soon, as I have to assume he'll pick up a good amount of users now that GPM is officially shutting down. It does the basic stuff just fine, and I've been using it as my daily music driver now since August, but it still has some bumps and bugs that will hopefully get ironed out with time.
Astiga doesn't have any music subscription and you have to provide your own files, so its very much sits in that gray area that Plex does, where the app doesn't openly condone piracy but also all but winks at you when doing so. I've had my own ethical conundrums with using it. I very much believe in supporting artists and have been buying music off of Bandcamp to put in my digital library, for which this kind of setup is great (buying a new album, downloading the files, tagging them, and then uploading them to my cloud storage is a very pleasing ritual that gives some "weight" to the music I buy). On the other hand, I also enjoy some artists whose works I'm not particularly interested in buying (e.g. Taylor Swift's discography would cost me ~$100, and she and all of the people who would be making money off those purchases aren't exactly hurting for money). Thus far the only stuff I've pirated has been stuff that I legitimately cannot purchase digitally, but it's admittedly very tempting to just hit up some torrents for some of the bigger, major label stuff.
The other concern with this sort of setup is longevity. At this point, I've now spent hundreds of dollars on Bandcamp buying albums -- well above the annual subscription cost of a streaming service. Projected out across years, I will be pouring thousands of dollars into my music library. I love that I'm supporting artists directly, but it does feel like I'm spending a good amount of money into what might amount to a house of cards. I download and backup all my music files, so I'm not at risk of losing them, but should my cloud storage (pCloud, at present) go under, or should Astiga die or decay, I'd be looking at a whole lot of sunk costs -- the deadweight of gigabytes of personal files when everybody else is streaming from subscription services. Surely there are other alternatives out there for playing music libraries from the cloud (and maybe even more with time?), but I don't like the idea that this could just go away at some point, much like GPM did. I don't want all that money I spent to become little more than a pile of files with no utility.
I used Google Music for a couple years while still moderating since we put out playlists across multiple platforms, but I eventually gave it up and stuck with Spotify for my paid streaming...
I used Google Music for a couple years while still moderating since we put out playlists across multiple platforms, but I eventually gave it up and stuck with Spotify for my paid streaming service. I liked Google Music when I used it though. Now I rely on a mixture of hard copy files on my server through PlexAmp and Spotify to supplement what I don't have saved.
I used Google Music from it's launch until about early 2019. I switched when it became pretty clear that Google was going to kill it off and switch to YouTube Music. I tried the new service and just didn't like it. I really dislike having to keep my music library/history and my YouTube history wrapped up into one list.
I really liked Google Music in the beginning since you could upload your own stuff to fill in the gaps and kept using it since it came with YouTube Red/Premium for free.
The overall UI/experience wasn't great but it was good enough to get by.
In the last two years, I've switched to just using Plex and keeping all of my music stored locally. I went through and spent some money to get the albums that I was missing or only had access to via streaming.
Same exact situation here. Moved over to Plex for my personal library. Also got a TIDAL subscription which has been surprisingly nice. Plex has some TIDAL integration but it's less than excellent. I don't expect that service to be around forever - at this point I don't really trust any service, but it's nice for discovery.
As for Plex, I'll use it as long as I can, but if it goes away ever, there's plenty of other options, and I still own the library. That's comforting to know.
I spent a lot of time over the past couple of years getting off of as many Google services as I could. Partially for privacy, mostly because I can't trust them to keep a service alive for longer than a couple of years.
Yeah, that's sort of my take, too. I know exactly what I'm getting with a streaming music or video service. Stuff can disappear at any time, they can go under, they can shut it down, etc. So if I like something, I buy it. But I do love to just listen to an old track I liked as a kid, or something from another country, or other one-off stuff like that. And streaming is great for that. If it's there, I listen to it. If it's not, no big deal. I find that that's most of what I listen to. Either just put on something to have some music going like I used to do with the radio, or look for specific songs that I don't really want to buy, but just want to hear one or two times.
Do you use anything for music on your phone?
Plex nowadays is incredibly good for that. They even have a really nice separate music player app and it's perfect if you have a pass and want to download things to your phone or stream from your server like normal. It's actually what brought me back to Plex, that shit is SO nice on iOS.
I've been away from GPM for a good while since I degoogled and I do not miss it at all. You can pair it with another streaming service if you really need to. I have Spotify through my girlfriend's family plan even though I listen to 90% of my music from my local library and that can occasionally be nice. Though if I didn't mind paying for a service I hardly use, my top choices would be Tidal Hifi, Deezer Hifi, or ideally Qobuz.
I loved my time with GPM but you can fairly easily get an equivalent / superior experience through other stuff nowadays.
Thanks! I'm now in the process of downloading all my music from Google play, and setting up my first plex server!
Do you use PlexAmp? I think that and Prologue are pretty solid apps. I have everything setup to automatically download and move to my server (with lidarr), but I'm still selective about downloads and rely on Spotify to supplement with what I don't want to keep locally long-term. I've found a nice balance between streaming and downloading.
Oh yeah, Plexamp was what I was referring to. It's so good, and Prologue looks like it would be similarly good if I cared for audiobooks.
As far as the balance goes, I like solutions that let me integrate them together. Tauon Music Box is my desktop music player and being able to manage a local library while also integrating tracks from other sources like Plex, airsonic, and Spotify feels nice. I'm pretty stubbornly anti-streaming, but this gives it a bit more utility for me.
Ah gotcha, I have a similar solution through Sonos. It allows me to search both Spotify and Plex regardless of device as long as I'm browsing through the Sonos app. If I'm out of the house and on mobile though, I have to go into PlexAmp or Spotify separately.
I probably would give up paid streaming altogether if it were just me, but the convenience of sharing a family plan is worth it for us.
I sync my Plex music library to my phone and play music from the app directly.
What GPM lacked in refined UI it made up for with top-notch selection and far better integration with the rest of their ecosystem, which is pretty important since voice controlled music was the primary use case. Nothing else has filled the void well enough, so I'm returning to self-hosting, this time filling primarily with bandcamp content and self-rips.
I was a GPM user from day one. I loved it, but after using YouTube Music since the beginning I have come to like it even more. The "For You" mix is great, the pre-made playlists are great, and I love the UI. I mostly listen to playlists, albums, or the personalized mix so it's perfect for me.
Yeah, I already had an iPod since a few years and all my music was in iTunes anyway, so choosing Apple Music as my media player made sense. The Android app also works decently well. I'd recommend it.
Google Play Music was a great product, though I'm honestly okay with it going away. I made a significant effort to de-Google my life a while back and it was one of my last holdouts.
I switched over to Astiga as my music platform, which I can recommend with some reservations. It's an app that makes a Subsonic server out of music files hosted on cloud storage. For the average Tildes user who knows about hosting and servers and whatnot, you probably don't need a middleman for that and could just do what Astiga does yourself, but for someone like me who doesn't really have the technical knowhow to make that sort of thing happen, I'm very happy with my "DIY cloud music" setup.
The official app is rough around the edges (though you can also use any Subsonic-compatible app), but its developer is continually working on it, and I suspect might pick up speed soon, as I have to assume he'll pick up a good amount of users now that GPM is officially shutting down. It does the basic stuff just fine, and I've been using it as my daily music driver now since August, but it still has some bumps and bugs that will hopefully get ironed out with time.
Astiga doesn't have any music subscription and you have to provide your own files, so its very much sits in that gray area that Plex does, where the app doesn't openly condone piracy but also all but winks at you when doing so. I've had my own ethical conundrums with using it. I very much believe in supporting artists and have been buying music off of Bandcamp to put in my digital library, for which this kind of setup is great (buying a new album, downloading the files, tagging them, and then uploading them to my cloud storage is a very pleasing ritual that gives some "weight" to the music I buy). On the other hand, I also enjoy some artists whose works I'm not particularly interested in buying (e.g. Taylor Swift's discography would cost me ~$100, and she and all of the people who would be making money off those purchases aren't exactly hurting for money). Thus far the only stuff I've pirated has been stuff that I legitimately cannot purchase digitally, but it's admittedly very tempting to just hit up some torrents for some of the bigger, major label stuff.
The other concern with this sort of setup is longevity. At this point, I've now spent hundreds of dollars on Bandcamp buying albums -- well above the annual subscription cost of a streaming service. Projected out across years, I will be pouring thousands of dollars into my music library. I love that I'm supporting artists directly, but it does feel like I'm spending a good amount of money into what might amount to a house of cards. I download and backup all my music files, so I'm not at risk of losing them, but should my cloud storage (pCloud, at present) go under, or should Astiga die or decay, I'd be looking at a whole lot of sunk costs -- the deadweight of gigabytes of personal files when everybody else is streaming from subscription services. Surely there are other alternatives out there for playing music libraries from the cloud (and maybe even more with time?), but I don't like the idea that this could just go away at some point, much like GPM did. I don't want all that money I spent to become little more than a pile of files with no utility.
I used Google Music for a couple years while still moderating since we put out playlists across multiple platforms, but I eventually gave it up and stuck with Spotify for my paid streaming service. I liked Google Music when I used it though. Now I rely on a mixture of hard copy files on my server through PlexAmp and Spotify to supplement what I don't have saved.