[Someone1234]

Google Music's multi-device support is terrible though.

"Playback Paused Because Your Account Is Being Used in Another Location"

I have a Google Music Family Plan ("up to 10 devices each"). But it simply doesn't work, I cannot even play both YouTube and Google Music on the same account, let alone playback on multiple devices.

We have a few Google Home Minis and a Google Home. They were initially all set up using the same Google Account (with the Google Music Family Plan), that meant music could only play on one device throughout the whole house and computers would be blocked if any Google Home started music playback.

The only workaround is to create a new Google Account per device, then hook it into your family group which will receive your family plan. I now have four additional completely useless Google Accounts just so I can play back music in different rooms or use YouTube and Google Music at the same time.

Netflix is the only service which gets multi-device right.

[dingaling]

> I now have four additional completely useless Google Accounts

I wouldn't call them useless. With Google's propensity for algorithmicaly-determined account suspension it's probably wise to have dedicated accounts for each combination of ( person / device ) * ( Google service ).

Certainly I would encourage anyone with a reliance on G-Mail to create separate accounts for other services.

[acct1771]

Does anyone know if this is against their ToS?

Not that I give a good goddamn, but, I just realized I'd always assumed it probably was, but have never bothered to check.

[jeffhuys]

Well, check it, then! You never bothered to check but you're already waiting for 7 hours now... ;p

[KirinDave]

I agree about this. I like Google Music and unlike Apple Music it didn't and doesn't want to delete all my music then shrug and say it's my fault for not buying from Apple, but... I can't even use youtube while my 3 year old daughter tries to listen to her bath music.

It's pretty ridiculous.

[crdb]

This happened with MP3s?

It happened to me with several hundred PDFs of sheet music from IMSLP that I was storing on iBooks. I couldn't work out where they had gone or why they were wiped. I switched to GoodReader and painstakingly had to rebuild the entire collection.

[KirinDave]

It happens with all forms of stored media.

Apple is not just an expensive cloud service provider, they're an untrustworthy one.

These problems have been going of for years. Apple just doesn't invest enough to fix the problem.