Author Topic: Google Music shutting down  (Read 4105 times)

psychoadept

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phred

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A good reminder why I prefer to keep my own music collection
Amen, Brother!
I am not a cloud-based person. I keep backups and backups of backups.

Imagine how many (soon-to-be-former) Google Music customers are scrambling to download all their music.
Download the latest MusicBee v3.5 or 3.6 patch from here.
Unzip into your MusicBee directory and overwrite existing files.

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frankz

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Rah Rah local files and all, but it's just transitioning to YouTube Music. Mostly a name change.  Same price, same content and you transfer your library - including your uploaded music - over in one click.

psychoadept

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It sounds like there's more than just a cosmetic change, there are also more things you have to pay for. And if I click on the link provided to transition to YouTube music, it tells me my YouTube account is ineligible (probably because it existed before Google acquired YouTube).
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frankz

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It's a gradual transition and not every account is flagged to move yet. You'll get an email when you are. The pricing is exactly the same.

I'm not sure what you mean by more things that you have to pay for. Have you actually looked into it? I have. You actually get more functionally on the free tier. Paid accounts still have what they had.


Quote
YouTube Music manages to impress with its free tier. You can stream anything you like as long as you keep your display turned on and the app in the foreground. On a laptop or desktop, you can even enjoy songs with the website in the background. The free tier is ad-supported, so if you're dealing with YouTube, you know what's coming at you. Google Play Music's free version, on the other hand, only lets you play mixes based on artists and songs on Google Home, limiting you to a random selection of songs. Both platforms allow you to upload and listen to files without ads and in the background. Songs you've purchased on the Play Store will be migrated to YouTube Music via the switching tool.

I'm not thrilled about the change - I'm a heavy GPM user for music discovery and very set in my ways as I'm sure you'd imagine and will hang on until the bitter end  - but it's not exactly the death of streaming as we know it either.

psychoadept

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No, I'm not saying it's the end of streaming. The article you linked does support the idea that some services won't work as they did before, such as the smart speakers. It sounds like it really depends on how you use the service now whether it will make much difference to you.
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Full_Circle

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I would have been a heavy user of Google Play Music (free) just for cloud access to my complete music library on the go. At the PC I use MusicBee to play files locally.

But having recently gone through with the transition over the YouTube Music, I can say I'm so far extremely unhappy with it.

Just from a cloud locker point of view, they app has very poor usability compared to GPM. "Genre" is no longer a section and their "Artist" section only displays "track artist", not "album artist", which is a bit of a nightmare. Worse still, when you click on a specific Artist, instead of displaying albums you have by that artist (which every other normal player does), it gives you a long list of every single track by that artist.  Totally unusable unless you enjoy playing random mixes of everything.
The other thing I found a bit disgraceful was that casting music through the app is now a premium only feature, which was free in GPM, though I believe they are looking into making it a free feature again.

For an app thats supposedly going to become the default music playing app on Android phones, I think its extremely half-baked.
I know I'm complaining about something Google are offering for free (cloud storage), but why downgrade the experience between two of their own apps?!

I think I'll be copying all of my music over to an SD card instead for listening on the go, instead of streaming.

isaccasi

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I also have my music on a harddrive, I also have streaming services(TiDAL Hi-Fi+Deezer Hi-Fi+Apple Music).
But my lossless Collection is 5.5 TB in size, and it is backed up multiple times.
I was a big fan of Google Music, not so much Youtube Premium. :'(

Holbytla

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Good thing I prefer downloading the music I purchase and play it locally. Not a big fan of streaming music. I have 3 different backups so I should be fine. ;D

Terry Walker

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Good thing I prefer downloading the music I purchase and play it locally. Not a big fan of streaming music. I have 3 different backups so I should be fine. ;D

Same here, I download them also and I didn't have any regrets.