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Comment by xyzzy_plugh | Hacker News Reader

My dad is in his 70s and had all his music in Google Music. It was great for him. Now he doesn't know what to do.

It's death by a thousand cuts for Google at this rate.

Google Music uploaded & purchased songs are automatically transferred to YouTube Music. Google music is not really killed. It is just replaced by Youtube Music, which has has a much better interface and also includes all music videos from Youtube, a killer feature for me. See https://support.google.com/youtubemusic/answer/9698084?hl=en

> which has has a much better interface

You're probably the only person I've heard from that has said that. I think YTM is marginally worse in most respects. I'll keep using it because I think spotify is also lacking and getting ad-free YouTube (which I'm grandfathered into) is a pretty good feature.

It's true that Youtube Music is a replacement / rebranding for Google Music, but the "better interface" is certainly open for debate.

A very strange thing I found is that, when you migrate your data from GPM to YTM, Google seems to "forget" all of its algorithmically curated data based on likes and play history. It's taking me a long time to "train" YTM back to where GPM was before the migration.

All of this is really disruptive to users though, and it's why I have taken to self-hosting the music I really care about via Jellyfin.

You're joking, right? YouTube Music is a tire fire. Search is broken, playlists are broken, playing in the background is broken. There's ads now?

If I wanted to watch music videos I'd open YouTube. I can't remotely recommend this to anyone, let alone my father.

Except the fact that the transfer doesn't always work. At least for me, it just straight up failed on some albums.

If your father has somewhat fast, always-on internet you just build him a personal streamer box using a single-board computer (RPi etc) and an external drive. Put something like Airsonic on it and he can listen to his music, netcasts, audio books and internet radio stations anywhere he wants. Hook it up to his stereo - him being in his 70's he might still have one - and he can use it as a jukebox, playing through the speakers without having to fiddle with Bluetooth.

> Hook it up to his stereo - him being in his 70's he might still have one - and he can use it as a jukebox, playing through the speakers without having to fiddle with Bluetooth.

Haha, I still have my stereo from 1980 or so, run it all day every day. Only these days, I drive it with a Grace Digital media player that sucks the files off of the desktop through the wired LAN.

I don't play directly from my desktop because I strongly dislike the bleeps and bloops from the computer, and those stupid autoplay websites. Easier to just disable the sound from the computer.

The computer stereo output also underlays an extremely annoying 60 cycle hum.

The sound quality from the computer DAC is horrible. Nice to use a real stereo (Carver amp and preamp for the win!).

I have a number of them, strewn around the house, connected to USB DACs which are hooked up to the server. On that server I run mpd which is controlled through either ncmpc in a terminal session, MALP on mobile. The server also runs Airsonic since that is more efficient for remote streaming than mpd+icecast. No bleeps or bloops since the USB DACs are only used for audio streaming and also because they're on a server which doesn't produce any bleeps or bloops to begin with.

Apple offers iTunes Match, which costs $25 per year and allows you to upload all your own music, making it accessible on all Apple devices.

I personally moved to Apple Music with my music library. Allows uploading and then streaming your own songs, has a streaming subscription option and a store to purchase music, and works on the devices I use. And while iTunes on Windows may be clunkier than Spotify, it's a hell of a lot more usable - for my use cases anyway.

I have lots of music that is not available on streaming services, so being able to upload and stream songs is a must for me. Spotify only offers syncing between devices which is definitely not the same.

The core of google is search. All their money is in search. Everything else is argued in service of search as a loss leader, such as Android which drives users to search but in itself costs a ton of money to maintain. If it didn’t drive users to search, it wouldn’t have value.

What if search falters? If Apple or Amazon beats it, or at least cuts the most profitable aspects of it. Or perhaps people finally care about privacy and switch to Duck Duck Go. I fear google will fall apart - all of their loss leaders that serve search will die, and it will become Gmail / Youtube co. Its cloud is on life support as it is, and IT in-the-know assumes all their B-grade services will be cancelled. Plus the trust-busters are knocking! If I were to bet on which FAANG will have the most trouble in this decade, it's [G]oogle.

The core of Google is its advertising business, search is but one of the ways they feed that beast.

> What if search falters?

Bing?

Take a look at airsonic, jellyfin or plex

You can upload your music to Spotify (until they stop providing it too).

Can you?

I'm a long time Spotify user and didn't know about this.

I know about https://support.spotify.com/us/article/listen-to-local-files... which isn't the same thing at all.

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