I gave up on that, when I realized that Google's spin-down of the music service has meant MOST of the songs in my playlists are now gone. When Google de-licenses the music, it vanishes from playlists. I'm still amazed Spotify never built enough of a Google Music client to help users login and gather their playlists.
I totally agree with you. I miss Google Play Music. In addition to a superior queue UI (hey Spotify, let me play a song next), they had the best playlists and song recommendations I've found on a streaming service.
Even though this is not related, you may have missed Google Play Music which was Googles Spotify competitor. It's getting axed in favour of YouTube Music.
I was a Google play music user for the entire life of the service. Lots of playlists, play history, ratings, etc. All of that is gone now. I tried multiple different apps to convert my playlists and library to Apple Music and even the official conversion to YouTube music but they all messed up my library and filled up with songs with similar names that are completely different genres and artists. Some music didn’t carry over at all and I have a vague sense that my playlists are not complete but no idea what’s missing. And while I liked the user interface of Google play music, I hate the interface of YouTube music and I’m not a fan of the interface of Apple Music. I lost control over how I play my music. I regret jumping on the streaming music bandwagon a decade ago.
Sadly it’s my understanding that they plan to shut down google play music completely in favor of YouTube music at some point this year (at least according to a friend-of-a-friend who works on it). It’s already quite buggy and frustrating, but I still use it mainly because I am on the grandfathered $8/month plan and also get ad-free YouTube included.
That being said I went through my Google Play billing recently and realized I’ve spent hundreds and hundreds of dollars on Google Play Music over the years. I don’t think I’ve listened to that much money’s worth of music considering the songs are about a dollar each to buy and I don’t add that many new songs every year.
Someone should build a tool that scans your streaming library on Google Play Music/Apple Music/Spotify or whatever and adds all of those tracks to an Amazon MP3 shopping cart to help you transition off the recurring service. I wouldn’t be surprised if something exists that does something similar using torrents.
For the last 6 years or so I -- foolishly it turns out -- chose to make Play Music my primary music platform. I was uncomfortable with subscribing to a music service and wanted to be able to keep my own library since the collection of music I own is a form of self expression for me. Google Play Music let me put my library in the cloud and listen to it on any device.
Now it's looking like I will probably lose a big chunk of it when Google Play Music gets replaced with YouTube Music since Google doesn't really let you download everything you've uploaded. I'm upset enough by this I am motivated to find a way to move away from other Google products to the extent that it is practical to do so.
Google's service was late to the party and feels like an afterthought. And Google has a pretty big history of shuttering products that don't get big, so I wouldn't want to trust to keeping my music there. (Spotify could of course fail, but is unlikely to stop offering a music service short of them going bankrupt).
Yeah, similar frustrating experiences here led me to cancel my spotify premium subscription today and try Google play music, which apparently has all but one of the albums I regularly listen to. Normally that'd bother me but Google lets you upload your own songs and they're treated like first class songs, so I'm super happy with my choice.
They deleted my curated playlist for programming while I was a paying customer and with zero warning. I just moved to a new service (and in parallel keep my playlist locally, with good old mp3 files).
Thanks for the warning, but unfortunately when it comes to Google one must never be surprised when their data is no longer accessible.
Maybe it’s better now. But for years basic playlist functionality on google music was buggy for me (randomly reordering songs and some other issues I have forgotten). Also no Linux app. Finally swapped to Spotify and never looked back. But I really miss being able to upload my old music.
Hah, I knew sooner or later Google would kill it off. Songza was a great buy, (They did semi-curated musical playlists by genre/mood/etc) had a better name, and made "Google play music" actually semi-decent.
Then Google let it sit, and rot, and die slowly on the vine over the past ~4 years. Guess its off to Spotify.
I was a google play music user since its inception and I switched to spotify. I paid 10$ for a tool to port over all my playlists, some which had over 800 songs. It was about 95% accurate so I'm a happy camper. Spotify's bread and butter is their music player so they're not going to cancel it anytime soon. lol
I loved Google Play music. Used it for years. Switched to Spotify when they shut it down and I don't particularly like Spotify, but I have enough custom playlists on there now I'm probably not going to switch unless something forces me to
I dropped Spotify in favor of Google Music because I could upload additional content I've purchased elsewhere and have it integrate in tightly with my playlists.
Some randomly selected people can transfer everything to YouTube Music. I can't, and it may be months before Google would allow me to. It's exactly that kind of treatment that makes me feel like Google has zero respect for its customers.
Spotify is generally better than Play Music though, so it was for the best in the end.
I used Google Music until they discontinued it in favor of Youtube Music, and I ditched that crap immediately, the UI was horrible, the recommendations were BAD (Google Music was somewhat good), and I lost about half my playlist items as "not available". It is so bad, that after years of Google Music, I just ditched my playlists (what little there was) and moved to Spotify.
This is so frustrating hear. I'm going through the same thing right now as google music just wasn't doing the job for me and enjoyed my experience with Spotify much more.
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