RIP Google Music, One of the Company's Last Examples of Generosity (techcrunch.com) 97
An anonymous reader shares a column: Google Music is dead, and with it one of the few remaining connections I have to the company that doesn't feel like a gun to my head. The service, now merged haphazardly with YouTube Music, recalled the early days of Google, when they sometimes just made cool internet things. It made it nearly a decade, though -- pretty impressive for a one of their products. I'll just say it up front: I'm a lifelong music pirate. Oh yes, I've reformed in recent years, but I've got a huge library of tracks that I've cultivated for decades and don't plan to abandon any time soon (likewise you can pry Winamp from my cold, dead hands). So when Google announced back in 2011 I could stream it all to myself for free, it sounded too good to be true. And indeed it was a relic of the old Google, which was quite simply all about taking things that are difficult to do yourself (find things online, set up a new email address, collaborate on a spreadsheet) and make them easier. Google Music -- as we'll call it despite it having gone through several branding changes before the final indignity of being merged into another, worse service as a presumably short-lived tab -- was not first to the music-streaming or downloading world by a long shot, but its promise of being able to upload your old music files and access them anywhere as if they were emails or documents was a surprisingly generous one. Generous not just in that it was providing server space for 20,000 songs (!) for free and the infrastructure for serving those songs where you went, but in its acknowledgement of other models of owning media. It didn't judge you for having 20,000 MP3s -- they weren't subjected to some kind of legitimacy check, and they didn't report you to the RIAA for having them, though they certainly could have. No, Google Music's free media locker was the company, or at least a quorum of the product team, announcing that they get it: not everyone does everything the same way, and not everyone is ready to embrace whatever business model tech companies decide makes sense. (Notably it has shifted several times more since then.)
I'm a pirate.... (Score:1)
yar matey....
Was nice but horridly outmoded (Score:4, Interesting)
I have been a Google Music subscriber for years now and while I did like the service, especially the value of getting YouTube premium bundled in with your subscription it's clear over the past few years that it was essentially abandonware for google with the UI and functionality essentially remaining static. Stupid restrictions like 1000 song playlist limits, pretty bad library management, no real playlist sharing, a pretty bad (although this is entirely subjective) shuffle function and a decent but lacking overall library compared to it's competitors. It's clear Spotify is the leader in this space as their interface and functionality is quite good. The music storage was a nice feature but it was one of the only features that set the service apart.
While I am giving Youtube music a shot it suffers from many of the same issues and what should be it's killer feature (having access to a huge library of music videos to accompany your library) it does not show videos for songs in a custom playlist which is a just a mind bogglingly lacking decision. It seems clear to me that google has a music product as an also-ran. They have it because they need to have it, not because they want to make a great music streaming service.
Re:Was nice but horridly outmoded (Score:5, Interesting)
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I just feel sorry for that poor llama. Its ass has to be pretty beat up by now.
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I quite like Foobar 2000. Needed a bit of tweaking to get it set up but now it's great. Just a big list, some basic controls and extensive plug-in support for things like editing tags and normalising volume.
Basically the same way I used to use WinAMP. The music library required too much effort to maintain, I just use folders on my HDD.
Oh and Musicbrainz Picard is good for tagging, usually does 90% of the work for you. Wish it could auto-download album art but you can launch a search from the app and then dr
Re:Was nice but horridly outmoded (Score:4, Interesting)
Back around 2004 Foobar and Nullsoft were sort of rivals. Peter Pawolski would trash winamps codec quality, and nullsoft would just trash foobar. This all culminated to some people from nullsoft registering gaybar2000.org and setting up a site that was a complete mirror of the fubar, but with homoerotic imagery. They even went as far as to take a resource editor to the foobar2000 exe and replace the play button with a crudely drawn mspaint penis. It was funny for the time. Peter was furious.
https://web.archive.org/web/20... [archive.org]
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That's incredible. Thanks, I had no idea.
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LOL.
I missed all the drama over media players but that is freaking hilarious.
Peter sounds a sore loser.
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Peter sounds a sore loser.
Come back and tell us when the work you're most famous for gets trashed not for a technical reason but literally homophobically at a time when homophobia was still very much rampant.
As for "loser", Foobar2000 is far more popular now than Winamp. Quite ironically The Winamp team not only trashed Foobar, they trashed their own product too with people hanging on to previous versions of Winamp 2 for dear life. It was so bad that Nullsoft continued developing Winamp 2 even 4 years after the release of Winamp 3,
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> work you're most famous for gets trashed not for a technical reason
So like GNU Image Manipulation Program (GIMP) developers? /s
It is a non-issue. Why do you allow people to live rent-free in your mind? One of the ways to know you've "made it big" is when people start parodying you. If you are too obscure no one will give two shits about you.
There will always be people who hate whatever you do, good or bad.
There will always be new releases that upset existing "customers". The trick is to discern betw
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So like GNU Image Manipulation Program (GIMP) developers? /s
I don't see GIMP getting any hate for anything other than it's shithouse interface and they have fixed that quite a bit.
Why do you allow people to live rent-free in your mind?
Huh? Are you on drugs? I read that now 5 times and I have NFI what you're talking about.
There will always be people who hate whatever you do, good or bad.
Nope not really. But hey if someone hates on you just roll over and take it like a "winner" right? Don't ever be critical of people who are actually out to get you. That makes you a looser.
Seriously what's wrong with you people. I've never seen more beta wimps.
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The fact that Peter got upset over Gaybar2000 shows that he is insecure.
He was wasting his time on non-issues.
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There are plugins that'll do that. In older versions, getting it working was somewhat fiddly, but in the current version, enabling the plugin to grab covers from Amazon is straightforward.
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Thanks, I'll look into it.
That's because (Score:2)
It really whips the llama's ass...
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I still use Winamp on my gaming machine, but on my machine where I've ascended there's qmmp [ylsoftware.com].
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Old WinAmp still lives. https://getwacup.com/ [getwacup.com]
It's a crowd sourced way to build Google's catalog (Score:1)
Millions of people ripping music CDs, uploading them to Google, adding notes, tagging the songs just built
out Google's entire catalog of music for it to sell for streaming purposes.
That's why it is free.
If Google had a free service to OCR any book page you take the time to upload, tag, write metadata, you would be building out Google books content that Google could sell with a simple publisher's agreement.
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While I am giving Youtube music a shot
All the same music with basically the same features.
Just a recognition that YT is very popular for for music, so building a separate platform didn't make sense.
Re: Was nice but horridly outmoded (Score:1)
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Avoid the cloud, its a trap. (Score:3, Interesting)
I was sad to see google music go, but there is so much space on my phone now I just keep a copy of my music collection there now. I set a a sync on andorid with SMBSync2, so I can keep it automatically updated. While I was at it I also set up a sync to back up pictures, since its always nice to have a backup of that.
Decided on foobar2000 for a media player on android after trying a few. seemed the closest to what I wanted. ability to play albums in a nice organized way, or shuffle when you dont care.
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Indeed. Cheap local storage with effortless backup makes storing my music on someone else's computer pointless. All my phones have MicroSD cards with pics, music and contacts stored there so if a phone is damaged I can just swap SIM and SD cards in a couple of minutes which beats downloading them any day.
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This, if you must stream your music, there are web streaming plugins for beets.
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Vanilla Music can be installed from the F-Droid repo and works quite well.
And I can report there have been no noticeable UI changes in 10+ years, though it does get updates.
Had it for about a year but the client apps sucked (Score:1)
Does Google need a better CEO? (Score:2)
It's difficult to be billionaires, not always wonderful. I can understand that Page and Brin did not want to have so much work.
SimpleMusicPlayer (Score:5, Informative)
https://f-droid.org/en/package... [f-droid.org]
YT Music (Score:1)
You can transfer your library, playlists, etc. to YouTube Music. It gets kept in your library/uploads section, and they finally a month or so ago added the ability to stream your uploaded library via Chromecast without your phone screen being on and without having to pay for their music service. The most major negative is that trying to scroll through all tracks or albums in the app or website is painful slow as it only loads 20 or so lines at a time. I'm not sure what other features are not porting over
corporate policy update: go ahead and be evil (Score:2)
It's sad, really. One the road to making a buck, nobody stopped to consider the value of good will.
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because they stopped giving away the free stuff they did for decades? The purpose of any company is to make money, not to give away money, companies that don't make money die. Welcome to reality, kid.
Re:corporate policy update: go ahead and be evil (Score:4, Insightful)
you fail to recognize the difference between "the way things are" and "the way we would prefer things to be". besides which, I'm as much a capitalist as you are (probably more), but a company's public image is worth a lot, and it's pretty easy to sell it off for a quick return. that is just short-sighted, and, ultimately, bad for business.
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a company's public image is worth a lot
Only until they get too big to care.
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Bad for business? Google's business is doing fine. People here think they are customers, when they are product.
https://www.statista.com/stati... [statista.com]
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and when enough people catch on that "free" services are not actually free, then that will be bad for business. because, when it comes down to it, most people would rather not give away their lives to a company that no longer holds any pretense of not being evil.
I'm the kind of old-fashioned Libertarian (yes, I carry a card) who still believes in doing well by doing good, not by screwing one's competition and fucking one's users. Google used to be those good guys, the David to Mic
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be evil
Seem like an appropriate comment, considering they just seamlessly replaced one product for another with no change in price or service level.
Google sold their soul for a quick buck many years ago. They used to be the cool kids. Now, they're just bullies and assholes, like every other tech giant.
Gosh, it's almost like they are a for-profit corporation. Suggest you look elsewhere for your morals.
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of course, you're right on both counts, but you also can't have it both ways. if they give something away, it's because their users pay for it somehow, but they don't know how, because, as you correctly indicate, they make money. nothing wrong with that, obviously, so long as its done honestly. the trouble is, most of these users don'
Sigh (Score:5, Insightful)
I kept 50,000 uploaded tracks on Google Music as a seed of essential content. A lot of tablets pass through my life and it was a real joy to drop 20 or 30 albums on one even while I was screwing around at a coffee shop.
Youtube Music was supposed to match the tracks I had, but my musical tastes don't lend to easy matching, and whatever Google did, it didn't work for my stuff. I'd guess it only successfully matched one in five tracks, which makes the data stored with Youtbue Music completely worthless to me. I understand that Google Music was costing the company money, since it paid royalties for uploaded data as well as what was sold or streamed, but I'm really disappointed to lose what I had.
I'm a grandfathered-in Amazon Cloud Music customer as well, but Amazon's software is slow and clunky. Spotify only has perhaps 15% of the content I had on my Play Music account and Apple doesn't exist to me.
We lost one of the good ones today.
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You can store an infinite amount of music on YouTube Music as well. It keeps the original files, you can verify using Google Takeout which will give you the original files back. Quite handy as a backup really.
Not sure what you mean about "matching tracks", it just streams the original files (recompressed) that you uploaded. The matching service is only for recommending their own music to stream. I guess they think people will discover music that way and buy it, or see ads or something.
I had around 50k track
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My files didn't transfer over. My uploads section is empty, verified as recently as 90 seconds ago. It SEEMS that it tried to match the tracks I had in playlists to data that was already on Youtbue, but the stuff it's including in no way matches up with what was there.
I already tried to make a support request about it but Google wasn't responsive to my issue.
Youtbue Music is worse in every way than what we had, not in the least for generally encouraging people to leave Youtube open while they're potentially
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I can confirm that what the person you're responding to is true. I had 40,000+ songs in Google music, and they all transferred over to YT music. All my music is in library->songs->uploads. Did you use their import utility or whatever it's called.
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Mine are not. I'm looking at the very empty page in another tab right now. I have playlists filled with random crap and an empty "uploads" section.
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You had to manually start the transfer, it's too late now. Your can upload again but as I said it's slow and annoying. Maybe rclone will support it one day.
For driving you can use Android Auto. I agree it's no Google Music though.
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I definitely went through the process. It copied over playlists (kind of), just not my files.
Maybe I'm the only person who had a problem, but it's still a problem.
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I have this problem as well. Just checked and my library is empty except for a playlist of music videos I made on youtube for one of my kids. I clicked on the link to initiate the transfer but it looked like it never worked.
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I had some tracks disappear when I did the transfer from Google Music to YT Music. Like you, I kept the weirder, leftfield music on there while Spotify provided anything mainstream. The tracks that never made it were some random tracks from Japanese indie rock and jazz bands. The tracks that got lost didn't follow any pattern either. They could be a single middle track in an otherwise happily transferred album.
First time that happened I set myself a reminder to try the transfer process again 2 weeks before
Another one bites the dust... (Score:2)
Google + was a fabulous platform for me, better quality, better correspondents, just plain better. But it never got enough 'market share' to be worth the effort, and like a lot of other products (Novell GroupWise suffered form this also) experiencing security problems, dropped from the portfolio. Not worth the effort. Google I think made a huge mistake there, but it's been over for a while, farewell.
Google Play Music I flogged the hell out of, put my fairly large collection online, and absorbed a lot of 'fr
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Ads interrupting free videos
So.... it's a for profit corporation. What do you expect? Hosting unlimited videos up to 4k resolution streaming them all over the earth costs money.
You could always buy-up to the ad-free plan if you don't like it.
Re: Another one bites the dust... (Score:2)
Or I could use the service I already pay for
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Or I could use the service I already pay for
Sounds like a good idea.
it's reminding me why I avoided YouTube for so long. Hate it. Spotify I will pay for,
So you are comparing Spotify's paid subscription to YT's ad-supported option?
Re: Another one bites the dust... (Score:2)
No, comparing Spotify's paid option to YouTube's paid option.
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No, comparing Spotify's paid option to YouTube's paid option.
Well, your only complaint was this:
But YouTube's naked revenue play is annoying as hell. Ads interrupting free videos, multiple ads to lead up to a playback, blah blah
YT's paid plan doesn't have ads.
Re: Another one bites the dust... (Score:2)
Google's abandonment of the Music platform forced me to either migrate to YouTube or go elsewhere. I've avoided YouTube for other reasons in the past. I'm not going to pay for what I really don't want.
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Ads interrupting free videos
So.... it's a for profit corporation. What do you expect? Hosting unlimited videos up to 4k resolution streaming them all over the earth costs money.
You could always buy-up to the ad-free plan if you don't like it.
One problem with that is that the only ad-free Youtube video plan they sell is bundled with Youtube Music. I have no interest in Youtube music - we've got two (!) already for some reasons, and Youtube Music doesn't even add anything interesting like lossless audio.
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Photos is already stopping the "Free high quality backups." I just got an email about that today. They've also removed the cool auto generated stuff tab... the animations, etc. You can do it manually only now. Probably a "Premium" feature more.
Honestly I can take their search of leave it. If they screw with Gmail too, I'll just move completely off their services and block everything from them at the router. Bye ad impressions.
CloudBeats (Score:3)
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You might have a better time with Plex. You'd need an always-on computer and a decent enough internet connection to handle your audio streams, but Plex Media Server can be forced to prefer local metadata or internet lookups. And then you aren't limited to the amount of storage in your Google Drive, and can use that space for other things.
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I switched from Google Music to Plex. The Media Server runs on my qnap NAS where my music is stored. I haven't used it much over the internet yet, just LAN - I don't think it does caching to local storage like GM used to do.
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Your computer, instead of someone else's. Then you can use airsonic for the classic remote cases, and NFS/SMB/whatever for home or other situations where you have the bandwidth for lossless.
It was NEVER about "generosity" (Score:2)
It's all still there? (Score:2)
I realize the YT Music interface isn't as friendly as Google Music was for uploaded songs, and working with it is different, but everything is still there. My playlists all migrated (a mix of Google and uploaded tracks), all of my stuff I uploaded that isn't on YT Music is still there and accessible, I can create new playlists with it, and I can still upload more crap. I feel like I'm missing something important, because whereas the interface has changed, the functionality is still there. I was all ready
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Not everyone's stuff migrated correctly. The forums are full of problem descriptions with hundreds or thousands of upvotes or "affects me too" comments. YouTube have been pushing fixes fairly regularly, but it's still not working smoothly for a lot of people. I haven't experienced the missing songs issue that an earlier post was describing, but I have personally faced the following:
1. the migration taking 3 weeks to bring across my 5GB of songs, instead of the 48 hours they said it would take;
2. playli
"... feel like a gun to my head." - A Bit Dramatic (Score:4, Insightful)
Google Music is dead, and with it one of the few remaining connections I have to the company that doesn't feel like a gun to my head.
Oh, please. GMail, Google Documents, Android, Google Maps, Translate, Google News -- If you feel like you have a gun to your head forcing to use any of those services, then the issue is your feelings, not Google.
Google is not a benevolent company. Never be under that pretense. But if you think you're forced to use their services, then you're either highly ignorant of other offerings or have a victim complex.
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Google Music is dead, and with it one of the few remaining connections I have to the company that doesn't feel like a gun to my head.
Oh, please. GMail, Google Documents, Android, Google Maps, Translate, Google News -- If you feel like you have a gun to your head forcing to use any of those services, then the issue is your feelings, not Google.
This. I'm also sad (and, frankly, a little angry in an exhausted sort of way) about the transition from Google Music to YouTube Music. Mostly because I'm pretty confident it will never achieve feature parity. One of the issues I have right now is that YouTube Music "radio" doesn't have an option to exclude explicit songs, which is kind of a problem given that I work from home (even outside of COVID) and have kids around. I'm sure I'll find lots of other issues, and I'm sure that not all of them will get fix
TANSTAAFL (Score:2)
Free music hosting (and no ads, I assume)? That's an expense for someone. It's amazing it lasted beyond 2012.
Degrades my Android Experience (Score:2)
What else in the Android ecosystem that we depend upon can go away at any time? Android itself?
Called it (Score:3)
I said in a post yesterday [slashdot.org] that Google's changes to Photos and the promo they're running with Stadia made it sound like they were paving the way to start "sunsetting" various services, and that we should expect to see such announcements in the coming months. Well, here we are just one day later...
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Google's constantly doing this and has been for years. This is nothing new. It's become a standard piece of wisdom that you cannot count on any Google product to remain, even if you pay for it, because they'll just pull the plug with little notice.
Good Riddence (Score:3)
I used the built-in and force Google Play Music app on my Android phone as the default music player since it was there and was non-removable for years and always noticed that it started up slower and slower with every update and sometimes failed to start up in time at all. It always tried to go online to connect to the Google servers even when it was set to use Downloaded Music only option to use locally stored albums on the shared storage partition. Now that the service and the app have been sunset and disabled I was able to force block it before I use ADB to remove it manually.
Due to this I downloaded an alternative music player. There were a few recommended ones that were simple but I chose the first one called Musicolet and it just worked fine for playing back my MP3s on my phone storage. I noticed that since it doesn't need to connect to the Internet it starts up quickly and my Bluetooth Volume manager which remembers the volumes for all of my bluetooth speaker devices is also able to send the Play command to Musicolet and it starts playing the music automatically for my speakers, headphones, and car without having to do it manually.
Google Play Store - Musicolet
https://play.google.com/store/... [google.com]
PLEX!! (Score:1)
PlexAmp (Score:1)
https://plexamp.com/ [plexamp.com]
WINAMP (Score:1)
WINAMP (winamp).... it really whips the llama's ass.... (llama sounds)
Holy entitled whining batman! (Score:3)
You're surprised that you don't get in perpetuity something that caused Google to hemorrhage money because it's own engineers decided to pretend copyright law wasn't a thing? Yeah you don't realise that Google Music payed royalties on every pirated song a user uploads did you.
Google didn't kill it, copyright law did. The concept was dead on arrival it's quite frankly mind boggling they kept with it as long as they did. This wasn't some engineers who "got it", it was quite literally the opposite, some engineers who really didn't think through the legal implications of what they were designing.
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What did copyright law kill? All of my uploaded music was transferred seamlessly to the new Youtube Music.
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What did copyright law kill? All of my uploaded music was transferred seamlessly to the new Youtube Music.
The service. Youtube music does not offer the same matching service. Thank Google that they let you roll everything over, but when you're done, read TFS and realise one of the biggest things the poster is lamenting is that Google no longer legitimises his pirated music collection.
Free Photo Storage also going away (Score:1)
I was a heavy user of Google Music, and I find Youtube Music to be inferior. I notice that certain track lists that showed up over Bluetooth using Google Music in my car no longer show up from Youtube Music. It's a small but annoying thing.
The other announcement from Google which will have a much more significant impact to my life is that they will no longer offer the high quality storage for non Pixel phones beyond June. On Pixel, they are keeping the high quality but doing away with the original qualit
Self-hosting (Score:2)
For photos I recommend Photoprism [photoprism.org] and for a Google Music alternative I recommend navidrome [navidrome.org] or airsonic [github.io]. Both are compatible with Subsonic API, so tons of players available.
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Photoprism looks killer. It would be awesome if it could scrape your Google Photos account to import directly.
I'll give it a test drive and soon as I get back from vacation. Those ominous emails Google sent out about photos tell me it's time to bail.
Rip Google Music (Score:2)
I was a fan of it for the same reason, huge pirated music collection. I moved to running my own Airsonic server a couple years ago when they announced the shutdown. That worked pretty well, but because the Android clients are awful (and recurring bugs in the server), I ditched it eventually.
I already ran a Plex server, so I just started using that for music. Their Plexamp app is pretty good. It definitely needs work, but they update it frequently and seem to listen to user requests. It requires a Plex pass,
What next? (Score:2)
Google Play Music -Any good replacements? (Score:1)
Where have I seen this before? (Score:2)
But Google bought out Songza, directed users to Google Music, made it hard to find the option to just listen to existing music they already had (adding tracks and listening to them was easy I'll admit. I'm talking about using Google Music as a radio station of sorts) and then killed Songz
Did storage space suddenly get expensive? (Score:2)
Did storage space suddenly get expensive or something?
The free Google Photos "high quality" tier is going to become de facto paid service soon as well.
And Google Drive is now deleting everything in the trash after thirty days.
Pretty much the same (Score:2)
Google has... (Score:1)
Google has changed drastically from its early days. Whether its early 'Don't be evil' policy was a ruse to build to the point it has, a genuine effort that soured (after all, it came about in the days that everyone was trying to distance themselves from appearing Microsoft-like), or they just got corrupted by power and money over time...it is definitely not the same as it was.
They are now an effective monopoly. They gather and sell your data, they actively censor, they try to implement sweeping social eng
Unsubscribed from YT Music... (Score:1)
...because you can't purchase and download tracks there, as you could on Google Music. Also the library organization and search utility work poorly with classical music. I currently trying classicalarchives.com as a replacement. So far, so good.
Furthermore no remining examples of Don't Be Evil (Score:2)
Don't Be Evil has left the building. (years ago)
Death via 'Parity' to YouTube Music (Score:1)