[andrewla]

Google Play Music was extremely album-focused, but their move over to YouTube Music has basically scrapped that.

GPM even let you modify the metadata for albums; I had used this to strip out things like "(2020 Remaster Special Gold Edition)" from album names, and to cut "bonus" tracks off of albums (nothing as fun as playing an album and then getting a two hour long spoken word interview with Quincy Jones), and finally to reorganize my classical music so that the artist was the composer and the orchestra/performer name was just munged into the album title (obviously deeper nesting would have been better, but this worked well).

Now with YTM even browsing by artist is nearly impossible, and when you do, it doesn't display the albums by that artist that you've added to your collection, it just displays everything, so there's no real way to avoid seeing 20 copies of the same album remastered at different times mixed in with "pop rock of the 90s" collections. It's just dreadful.

All I want is a music service that lets me access an unlimited virtual store and bring whatever content I want and organize it recursively by tags (i.e. when I navigate to "artist" it presents me with the ability to narrow my search by "composer" or "album" or whatever). I stick with YTM mostly because it came with free ad-free YouTube. There is no public API to talk to the service, though, so I can't even build my own frontend (although there are numerous hacks, most of which involve checking your plaintext password into a git repository, which of course means compromising your gmail account which is essentially the end of the world).

[echelon]

The degradation of Google Play Music into YouTube Music has to be one of the most disappointing product merges in history. All of the power functionality disappeared. I can't even find the music I want anymore without great effort.

As a consequence, I'm listening to my favorite artists less frequently, and haven't even thought about concerts, festivals, albums, etc.

A dumb but rich tabular music + metadata store would be a game changer. Add in tags and multi-dimensional ranking, and I'd be in heaven. Add an API, and I'll gladly pay $50/mo.

I want iTunes 1.0, but with the ability to sync between the cloud and all of my devices. With smart playlists that can operate over my tags and ratings.

That's it. No music videos, no real need for album art or lyrics, but certainly no UI removed for simplicity or dumbing down the product.

I want to index and traverse my music in my own way.

[blakes]

I miss GPM so much. No one I know in person knew it existed, yet they still get to listen to my rants about Google killing the one true music service.

I too have been finding music discovery difficult since GPM shutdown. YouTube Music is getting better at discovery fortunately, but I'm not finding multiple new albums/artists per week, more like 1-2 new albums or artists every couple weeks.

One of my favorite GPM features was the "concerts in your area", that is the only way I knew that some artists were coming through my city. It was one of the last features they added. The new album release feature was fantastic as well, although YTM has it now and it works pretty well.

Also, GPM would cache music locally on your device as you played it. If you were offline, you could just display explicitly downloaded music along with the cached music, it was the best for driving through the mountains or flights. If you were playing a playlist, it would cache multiple songs ahead of the current song, sometimes I'd get 30 minutes out of service before the music would stop.

I'll probably complain about the death of GPM for many more years.

[heavyset_go]

> One of my favorite GPM features was the "concerts in your area", that is the only way I knew that some artists were coming through my city.

SongKick and Last.fm have solved this problem for me for years. I haven't used them for concerts since before COVID, so I don't know if they're still good for shows.

[pavel_lishin]

YTM supports caching music locally much like GPM did, although I believe you have to explicitly specify what you want to cache on your device.

[AlexandrB]

Seems like something similar happened to Google Pay[1] as well. With a few exceptions Google seems to suck at discerning between good and bad products. It'll shelve the likes of Reader or neuter Google Play Music, but insist on pushing garbage like G+.

[1] https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2021/03/the-new-google-pay-r...

[Yhippa]

This one boggles my mind. To take something that worked resonably well and degrade it into...whatever it is now is such a bad feeling. I guess Resume Driven Development is alive and well there.

[Talanes]

To be fair, Reader and Google Play Music did both outlast G+, so it's not like the garbage fairs any better.

[Arrath]

I'm glad I'm not alone in lamenting the demise of Google Play Music.

[ryanobjc]

itunes match is what you want.

You can upload your own music to the cloud, and whatever matches existing ones just matches to the itunes store so you dont actually have to upload everything - this is the 'match' in the 'itunes match'.

And it's $25/year.

[iggldiggl]

With the caveat that matching process might mis-match things when the same song exists in subtly different versions and there isn't a good way to manually override it when that happens.

[sylens]

I really loved GPM too and them merging it with YouTube Music pushed me to Spotify

[mayneack]

Like several other comments here, I had the same experience as you and decided to go with plex. What no one mentioned is that plex allows you to add a tidal library in addition to your self hosted content. It's not a perfectly seamless experience because you have to mark tidal albums one at a time to add to your self hosted library and I don't think you can cache them offline on plexamp (for android at least), but it's the best I've found.

I'm hoping to give Roon a try someday, but plex works well enough that I haven't quite gotten up the activation energy: https://roonlabs.com/downloads

[lowbloodsugar]

Roon is great, both for personal listening and for parties. I've discovered great music by leaving a cheap tablet with the Roon UI open at parties, and hearing what people come up with. Several times we've had groups passing the tablet back and forth with comments like "Well, if you like that, then try this..."

[busterarm]

I found Plex fairly useless for managing my music library but throwing everything into my Synology's Audio Station and connecting via DS Audio has been amazing.

[amanzi]

The new PlexAmp music player from Plex has revitalised my music library on Plex. I would have agreed with your statement prior to using PlexAmp, but I now listen to way more of my old music library than before.

[oregano]

I somehow have completely missed the announcement on PlexAmp. I’ve just been using their standard ‘Plex’ iOS app all this time. I just now downloaded PlexAmp and it looks great. I love to rate and add tags to my music while listening so I hope this app provides a good UX for that (in addition to the obvious needs like sorting and organizing). In terms of initial impression it looks waaaay shinier than their standard app I’ve been using all this time. Excited to start using it more.

[ascagnel_]

Plex can also handle audiobooks reasonably well if you play them with the app Prologue.

https://prologue.audio/

[standardUser]

Google Play was ideal because I could upload any of my own music and it was part of my library, accessible anywhere in the world.

Does any service like that still exist? I'm stuck with Spotify, which lacks dozens and dozens of albums that are important to me, and it won't let me upload them myself.

[morsch]

Spotify actually lets you do that, so you're in luck. Add local files on your desktop to a playlist, download the playlist on your mobile device, done. I'm using the feature, it works. Though it does not work with my "Spotify remote play" (or whatever they're calling it) kitchen radio.

The feature is so niche, I half expect them to drop it without a word in any given update.

https://community.spotify.com/t5/Android/Play-quot-local-fil...

[hbn]

I haven't tried this myself, but from what I read about it, it's basically a manual sync you have to do which isn't what he was asking about. GPM had a music locker feature, where you'd just upload it once to your account and then you could stream it from anywhere like anything else on the service.

YouTube Music and Apple Music have similar features but they're not nearly as intuitive or convenient as GPM's was.

[erdaltoprak]

Hi,

I was trying to explain that in the blog post too, in Apple Music your own added songs are uploaded and act as any other streaming song and I think it’s pretty amazing, also the fact that your song now has all the inherited features like Siri/Spotlight search!

[sorenjan]

I don't use Apple music myself, but I've heard that it doesn't actually use your songs but uses song name matching which sometimes gives you censored versions of explicit songs. Is this true?

I remember when I used Google Play Music and it kept the AOL sound in "my" copy of a certain Tatu song, so that was definitely streaming the uploaded song.

[shrikant]

Well, I'm pretty sure GPM did some level of acoustic matching nonsense to optimise storage or bandwidth, because it changed a bunch of songs that I'd uploaded into a different language version of song.

[kall]

It does that if it can match them, and uploads them if it can't. Downloads on other devices might be 256 kbps AAC either way, so not a backup service.

You cannot officially force an upload, but I would expect there to be some kind of hack for it. If I remember correctly, calling the album "Red Album (sorejan's Version)" actually does the trick.

[h4waii]

I believe this also only works if your devices are on the same LAN at some point in time to sync locally.

[651549846546]

I've been keeping an eye on https://ibroadcast.com

It fills my use case precisely and has replaced GPM. They host my own library (various upload/sync clients), with a reasonable web/app+offline experience.

it has chromecast support, tag editing and all sorts.

I'm a little concerned how slow they've been to monetise. Free version transcodes to 128kbps, eventual paid offering ("around $3.99 USD per month", currently free) offers original-quality streaming. Not aware of any library or bandwith limitations.

Edit: avert your eyes - their landing page is atrocious but once logged in things are much better

[hbn]

Spotify is actually the only one of the big 3 (Spotify, Apple Music, YouTube Music) that doesn't have a cloud music locker feature, and it's basically the entire reason I can't use it.

However, both YouTube Music and Apple Music treat your uploaded stuff as second-class citizens to the stuff streamed from their music collection. Which is one of the biggest reasons I miss GPM, since it was much better for that.

YouTube Music has a pretty intuitive music uploading system, though it comes with all the previously mentioned baggage of YTM. With Apple Music you have to upload through Apple Music on a Mac or iTunes on a PC, and it's a real clunky system that usually takes me a bunch of finagling and forcing syncs over and over again until it finally works. So pick your poison

[kall]

In what way are they second class? I actually feel the opposite way, because I can use only uploaded/matched tracks in apps like Djay, Capo or GarageBand.

[hbn]

First things that come to mind is they don't come up in the default search (you have to manually toggle to a separate search of your library), and also they don't show up in the web player at all.

[elsonrodriguez]

My only lament is lack of family sharing, other than that it's been seamless for me.

[kall]

Oh that's unfortunate. I remember when you used to be able to share your whole iTunes library with people over the network, possibly even over the internet?

[hraedon]

Apple offers iTunes Match [1], a service that is separate from Apple Music. It is something like $25 a year and does more or less what you're asking for here, especially in conjunction with Apple Music.

[1]: https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT204146

[merb]

also itunes match is included in apple music and you can mix and match apple music and match (or local songs and if they are not local), you can also sync these with any device

[artdigital]

That’s exactly what Apple Music does, and the article even mentioned.

I switched from GPM to Apple Music and not Spotify because I have a lot of tracks that don’t exist on streaming services. I can have playlists consisting of apple Music songs and my own songs, and get full Siri integration, play on HomePods etc

[oregano]

Hmm around 18-24 months ago I gave Apple Music a try but found there were TONS of tracks from my personal library that the service would not play. Perhaps they’ve improved things since then? I went all-in using Plex as a personal media server since then and while the UI isn’t as nice, it lets me steam my personal library anywhere from any device.

[smithza]

You may have chosen not to subscribe to iTunes Match which is the feature which gives you access to Apple's servers to host all your songs instead of keeping them strictly local. At least that is how I understand it.

[oregano]

I’m pretty positive I did this actually as I recall the ‘match’ service being an additional fee. I was stoked to have a cloud option for my library as I’d been maintaining it for 10+ years and always griping about backups. I recall it working great for tunes I’d purchased from Bandcamp but when it came to tracks which had been in my library for many years (originating from many different sources), they simply didn’t show up in my library. Again- this was around 2 years ago so it’s possible this is no longer an issue.

I’ve since setup a Synology NAS with Plex and it’s mostly great.

[mwarkentin]

You don’t need to subscribe to Match if you’re an Apple Music subscriber.

[29083011397778]

Why not just run your own streaming service? You're here on hn, so standing up a webserver (or even a Raspberry Pi) is hardly beyond your means presumably. Subsonic [0] appears to be well polished. I've used a FOSS fork called Airsonic [1] previously, though I've played with (and liked) Polaris [2] in the past.

All three would meet your (possibly only) requirement of using your own music, and I wouldn't consider any too difficult to set up.

[0] http://www.subsonic.org/pages/index.jsp

[1] https://airsonic.github.io/

[2] https://github.com/agersant/polaris

[spurgu]

+1 for Subsonic, it's nice. I haven't used it extensively, but have had it running now for 1-2 months listening casually without issues.

[dangravell]

I operate a service that does this: https://asti.ga/

Happy to answer any questions.

I also wrote up some other example services a while back:

- https://www.blisshq.com/music-library-management-blog/2021/0... (these integrate storage)

- https://www.blisshq.com/music-library-management-blog/2021/0... (these are bring-your-own storage)

[teraflop]

You can still upload your own music to Youtube Music. The UI sucks (you have to use entirely separate search boxes to search for uploaded vs. Youtube tracks, and AFAIK you can't edit metadata without downloading and re-uploading files) but it gets the job done.

[brundolf]

I put my personal collection on Dropbox and use an app (iOS) called TuneBox that presents it as a streaming music player

[Nomentatus]

Youtube music subscription was supposed to do this, with your previous Google Play library, if you made the transition. Using Google Home devices. I plan to pony up for that someday when things settle a bit for me, so hope I do get this service.

Just checked and they still have my music "stored" waiting for me.

[MonaroVXR]

>Does any service like that still exist?

https://www.ibroadcast.com/home/

[quitit]

The article mentions this as one the key differentiators between AM and other big music services.

[MBCook]

Apple Music does.

[Thaxll]

It's really a weird merge, I browse youtube and I see the music I like from Youtube Music there because musics are somehow fetched from YT and not from a different place ( like it was on Google music ).

It seems that if the music is officialy available on Youtube, Youtube Music fetch the music from there, if not it's using an internal catalog.

[JeremyNT]

I still pay for it... but only barely. It's a sad shadow of GPM, which was much more to my liking.

If you want to avoid their awful YTMusic web UI there are options. There's a decent, standalone, GUI YTM application for KDE [0] which I've used (sadly it doesn't support logins, but if you just want a player it works well enough).

There's also a plugin for Mopidy [1] that lets you listen through your MPD / snapcast [2] server, but that's more fiddly.

[0] https://apps.kde.org/audiotube/

[1] https://github.com/OzymandiasTheGreat/mopidy-ytmusic

[2] https://github.com/badaix/snapcast

[judge2020]

In my experience you can open most all videos categorized as 'music' from YPP creators, but the 'songs' section of search results is effectively the Google Play Music/actually-published songs index.

[pavel_lishin]

And vice versa - I'll try to look through my playlists, and I get a mix of my music ones, and my YouTube ones. Just a baffling design choice.

[germinalphrase]

Everything is worse under Youtube Music. Embarrassing product.

[kingcharles]

I have to disagree. One of the reasons I use YouTube Music is because their search includes all the random music uploaded to youtube.com. This means that a lot of really rare tracks that YTM never received officially from the labels can be integrated into your library. I guess YTM then tries to sort out the royalty issues as they do through youtube.com.

[packetlost]

YTM is objectively inferior to GPM in every way except library size and some details that only YouTube/Google have to worry about. The apps are buggy as fuck and have little more than "radio" features and a (crappy) search bar. Playlists are intermingled with youtube video playlists and have no search and only rudimentary sorting, viewing albums is a pain, finding your own music is a minimum of 3 button clicks, and the app flat out does not work half of the time.

[matwood]

I was very happy with GPM, and was a long time user since the beta (7.99/mo intro pricing was also nice). Then they stopped updating GPM and started pushing YTM. It was terrible so I went to Apple Music (at the time it had recently come out), and have been there ever since.

[willis936]

I've been on the same journey. My plan is to self host plex. Cache the music I want, VPN/stream when I want to add more to the cache.

[kaladin-jasnah]

I have Qobuz combined with mpd (there's a plugin). It's not the cheapest but it's decent for what you get and the UI is simple and doesn't get in your way. My only regret is that it doesn't have lyrics AFAIK.

[kall]

This is what the article is about anyway but I suppose you don't use apple devices so you are not in a position to use Apple Music fully?

It sounds like you might like it, because it can do all that.

I'm not sure about your exact navigation idea but Apple Music has a JS api for web applications as well as "local" OS level API on iOS, so there are blessed third party interfaces. On iOS, there are really polished and customizable full alternative clients like Marvis Pro. On iOS and macOS, you can also "end user program" Apple Music via Shortcuts. I have accomplished a lot with that, building an interface for browsing playlists as album collections, grouping those playlists and workflows for moving stuff between them. On the web it looks more like some toy projects (still full clients tho).

There is the official web app and an android app, but I think you can only get to the full metadata management power on a Mac (because it still caries most of the iTunes legacy there).

[stavros]

Remember Grooveshark?

[bsanr2]

Grooveshark was better than any other service - including Pandora - at exposing me to music that I wasn't expecting to love but did anyway.

[holler]

Grooveshark and later Rdio were my favorite music sites ever... best UI and easy to use

[busterarm]

Grooveshark and the early years at Last.fm... Gosh I miss those.

[heavyset_go]

YouTube Music is the reason I moved over to self-hosted Jellyfin to host my music collection.

[_jal]

To anyone else who still wants to own their own music, I highly recommend looking at Jriver Media Center. Not free, and it is a bit of a strange application at first. But I find it extremely capable and flexible, and because it is just a player, they have an interest in catering to you instead of the copyright rentiers.

I use it with my main stereo and stream music to network players in other rooms. (It does video stuff too, I don't use any of that.)

No connection to them other than as a happy customer. https://jriver.com/

[NewJazz]

Where do you source your originals? Bandcamp is my go to, but not all artists publish there. Amazon often has physical CDs and MP3s for artists, but I have not patronized them for such goods (yet).

My process for downloading from Bandcamp, extracting the files, and syncing them to the storage could be automated a bit more I think.

[heavyset_go]

Bandcamp, and for old/obscure things I can't buy elsewhere, SoulSeek.

edit: forgot about discogs.com

[kuschku]

Bandcamp and CDs, the best way to get music in proper formats.

[CameronNemo]

Another option is Funkwhale. I've not tried it, but it seems cool.

https://funkwhale.audio/apps/

[heavyset_go]

This is a nice one, too. I just couldn't get it to play nicely with Docker Swarm.

[CivBase]

Same here, except I went with a self-hosted Emby server. For me, one of the real valuable features of GPM was the ability to sync playlists and albums locally on my PC or phone. Emby lets me do that, but it infortunately doesn't sync playlists yet. I don't think Jellyfin has any local sync support, though.

[apocalyptic0n3]

Same here, except I went the Plex/Plexamp route. Terrific experience.

[commandlinefan]

> an unlimited virtual store and bring whatever content I want and organize it recursively by tags

Isn't that what Spotify and Pandora are?

[andrewla]

I've never used Pandora in a paid mode, so I can't speak to that.

Spotify has some features that map to this, but is way more artist focused than album focused. When you click on an artist, you get the artist's page, and navigating to the albums that you have added by that artist is nearly impossible. That is, there's no way to engage hierarchically -- to say "I want to listen to a Neil Young album that is in my collection". You have to either decide on the album from memory and just find it, or you have to go to the artist and hope that the album you like is one of the "recommended" or "hot" ones by Neil Young.

[hnrodey]

Create a playlist from the album so that it's in your "collection" (of playlists). That's only way I know how to accomplish.