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Comment by progbits | Hacker News Reader

So are the mp3 files not the same as what the author uploaded? I could imagine weird organization for tracks from the service but for self-uploaded data I would be surprised if they didn't just give them back the same.

The article never mentioned how this showed up in the GPM app itself which feels lacking.

Otherwise a nice article but it reminds me why I long ago gave up on media metadata organization. So much work, so much mess...

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IIRC, GPM stored user uploads in MP3. If you uploaded a non-MP3 file, it was transcoded into a MP3 during upload. It is this file that GPM takeout is providing.

Separate from that, GPM matched your uploaded MP3 file against the service music corpus, and if there was a match, the service streamed the canonical version. Originally the streaming service used 320 kbps MP3, but later the service switched to 256 kbps AAC. GPM takeout does not provide the canonical version.

In the case of lossless files, the takeout files are empathically not the same files that were uploaded. Google Music would allow a user to upload lossless FLAC files, but internally it converted them to 320 kpbs MP3 files. So, GPM certainly transcoded a portion of uploaded files. I'm not sure to what extent it left files alone if they met Google's formatting specifications. Perhaps someone else knows.

I don't think they did very much leaving things alone. One of my biggest problems with GPM was that my uploads would seemingly get de-duplicated alongside some other record that wasn't exactly the same, like a reissue or a remaster of the same record that sounded noticeably different. Sometimes an album I uploaded would gain a mysterious bonus track. They also at some point hosed up the whole system in such a way that many of my records contained every track twice, which meant I had to make playlists out of my old albums just to remove the even-numbered tracks and make it listenable again.

If you takeout from YTM it says your music files are "Your originally uploaded audio file" which is nice. Since music in YTM may have been migrated from GPM, that seems to imply that GPM retained the originals.

When they shut down GPM I migrated to YTM, which doesn't seem to have these specific catalog problems. I also just re-organized my local copy of my FLACs using MusicBrainz Picard. Unlike this author I no longer have the giant wall of CDs!

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