I’m cleaning out my gmail folders this weekend, and went deep into the archive to 2011, when I got my invite to Google Music.
It’s funny, because I just (November) moved all of my music out of cloud and back to local-only. Amazon was the last straw, when I tried to play purchased music, and was forced to listen to it on shuffle with other songs not of my choosing.
Anyway… there was a time when Google (ahem, Youtube) Music was set to be a game-changer. Imagine if enshittification wasn’t a thing.
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.
I have had Emby forever. Love it for videos, but it’s absolutely garbage for music. It’s just not built to support music, so it’s clunky and slow. I never used plex or jelly, but both built stand-alone music apps to address this exact problem, so I would assume they are both better. Emby was asked to build one, but they basically said no and also not anytime soon if they ever do decide to. They really didn’t seem to get what was so bad with what they already offered.
Not sure; I’ve been using Plex for music. The app (and added features) are very nice to have (and don’t exist in Jellyfin).
I run a JF server as well as Plex to see where they are (from time to time) with their music app and it doesn’t have nearly the features PlexAmp has.
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.
Those are just players, right? Navidrome is also a subsonic server. Do you use something else?
I use Navidrome with Symfonium, love it! Thanks for letting me know about Tauon. I use Supersonic but Tauon seems will also fit my needs, don’t know why I hadn’t seen it before
+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.
I was a day one GPM music user until it was discontinued. That app was my most used service ever and it took thousands of hours to curate my whole collection there. When Google killed it, I vowed to never become dependent on a Google product much less a cloud based service ever again. PlexAmp is my go to now.
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.
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
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 .
