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google drive, then installed a sync client to automatically download them onto my phone and use vlc to play them. 99% the functionality of google music without any fuss and it can even do really advanced stuff like playing music with the screen off. If only youtube music's engineers could manage something as complex as that!

Hmm, that's OK if you're already paying for google drive or if you only have 15GB of music. For someone like me with 150GB that's £8 a month which is almost the cost of a streaming music subscription. Anyone recommend any free alternatives for uploading your own music to the cloud?

As far as I can tell, you can do that with YouTube music, and also migrate there the music you have in Google Play Music.

Yes you can migrate it, but unless you cough up for a subscription you cannot download it to your phone, nor stream it over your Sonos or other connected speaker, so the free Google Ply Music was far superior (of course)

I thought any NAS can do it?

Buy a big microSD.

Seriously.

128Gb Samsung is £17 on Amazon at the moment.

I mean... being a music lover and all, you DID buy a phone with a microSD slot, right?

And when your entire collection can sit on a tiny card, I see no point having a cloud service for it at all. But if you wanted one, just about any home NAS with the default software will do what you want.

A work around to get unlimited song streaming is to use something like FFMPEG to make all your music tracks into videos, and then you can upload them to the Google photos service as long as you use the option of unlimited storage.

You could make the videos a low resolution and just a black screen with the artist and track title to reduce used data when streaming.

I just sync (via Dropbox) what I need. I have around 30-40 GB of stuff but it doesnt need synching constantly and then I don't need an internet connection to listen. It's mostly paid for which means the musicians get paid more (not that I really care). 150 GB should be easy enough with an SD card, though I'd cut out the middle man and plug the phone into the computer.

They need to get moving with a desktop client for Youtube music really. There's a chrome App, but chrome apps are going to stop working soon.

Google offering a Desktop client? Unlikely. You're supposed to use the [1]music.youtube.com website, or the phone app.

[1] https://music.youtube.com

I have a large iTunes library which I've never quite escaped from. Having this run on Android has always been a bit annoying (need Apple Music subscription for the proper app). Google Play Music did an OK job of uploading my iTunes library and letting me use my iTunes playlists, though it was buggy.

Anyone got any tips? I used a 3rd party sync agent but it was also annoying enough that I gave up with it.

Solve the problem in your first sentence.

Just export every piece of music, store it on a card, NAS, cloud account, whatever, and deal with the problem once and for all.

So what happens to the Play Music App, in that case? I use it on my phone just to play tracks I have downloaded. Does this mean I need to find a new music player app?

VLC works fine on Android.

Hell, I use it to watch TV (via tvHeadend and a cheap Raspberry Pi with a DVB hat on it - which I saw for sale for just £6 on top of a RPi cost recently).

Loads of good music apps out there – Apollo is possibly the pick of the free ones.

Few things appear to be missing from YouTube music; ordering playlist by playcount, and how to buy the bloody songs. Anyone know how to buy music any more??

It's a streaming service. Are you also looking for how to buy the TV on Netflix?

Potify - An app which plays especially soothing/calming music and or sounds to assist toddlers (and thier parents), who are going through toilet training - just a thought. [I feel sure many here will feel the urge to poo poo the idea though.]

I'd forgotten Play Music existed.. Perhaps it would have been more successful if Google had been anywhere near as proactive in publicizing it as they have Youtube Music.

The YouTube Music app absolutely sucks.

After a lengthy career ripping off MP3s, I saw the light and became a legit above board streamer. The Google Play family subscription was the right price and had all the choonz and features I wanted.

Sadly, I think I will use this opportunity to look at other options (probably become a sheep and join Spotify).

Anyone got any better ideas?

So will I be able to remove the unwanted, unneeded and unused Play Music app from my phone?

Or will it still be classed as a system app that can't be removed but will get no more updates and be a huge vulnerability waiting to happen?

Ahh yes, the ability to remove useless unwanted apps - there's a poignant reminder of the good old days.

iTunes had a nice feature that ripped any music CD to MP3. When google said I could synch my "collection", I just synched that folder. It tended to have iTunes cruft in there so when I synched that back to my new PC(s) this increasingly insignificant junk came too.

For some time Google has been telling me to link it with its latest offering I have been prepared for it to dump music.google.com in the same way as other useful things have been dumped in the past. I have no interest in an additional streaming app. Spotify is fine. I just like the option of saving what I have bought and paid for in such a way that I can play it on my phone, tablet or whatever. Yes, I could easily rig something up round my house but, sometimes, I go out the door!

Can Google ask manufacturers to remove it from their stock images, since a lot of the time, you can't uninstall this crap !

There you go, Samsung. That's why giving up on your (frankly superior) music player and directing everybody to use Google Music instead was a real dick move.

Not only is your app better (thankfully it is still around so I downloaded and installed it) but you clearly never learned the lesson about Google's propensity for coming up with cool ideas, making half-ass implementations, and then killing them a few years later.

Just read and learn: https://killedbygoogle.com/