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Ask HN: Alternative to Google play music once they close?

9 points by matt_the_bass ↗ HN
I’ve been using google play music for about 6 years. It’s a convenient way for me to access all my music (mostly ripped CDs).

Google is shutting down this product at the end of the year. Any suggestions for an alternative? I like being able to access my own collection and not crazy about paying a second time to access music I already bought. But if I am going to pay for a service, which one?

10 comments

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gusmd
I hate Google for this. I love Google Play Music, and have had a premium subscription for many, many years. Youtube Music doesn't come close, the interface is absolutely horrible, a UX disaster. Way to go in alienating your paying customers, Google.

Sorry for the rant. I know it is not what you were looking for. I have no solutions for people that use the upload stuff (which I don't).

KingMachiavelli
Embrace the rant. While I've made effort to reduce my usage of other Google products for privacy reasons, Google Play Music is literally the last Google service that I haven't removed since the alternative are not much better.

If you don't need the upload features are OK with the same level of privacy issues associated with streaming services, I'd have to image Spotify is the next best thing with Apple Music (really?) a close third.

However, the lost of GPM will most likely make me reconsider using streaming services completely. There seems to be a few options for self hosting a 'streaming' music platform. Just browsing F-droid (FOSS Android store), there are clients for connecting to Subsonic [1] servers which seem target for this use case. I'm not sure how it compares to the popular Plex software [2] (which I actually think is bloated & overkill but I guess it would also work).

[1] http://www.subsonic.org/pages/index.jsp [2]https://www.plex.tv/watch-free/

A few other apps (personally I use my phone 90% of the time I'm listening to music so having a Android app is essential at least until I can migrate to a Pinephone).

1. MPDroid - says it can stream from a MPD instance which sounds very cool. 2. AMPlayer (outdated but might lead somewhere) - connects to an Ampcache instance which integrates with nextcloud/owncloud. This sounds pretty cool.

There are of course apps that will scrape music from YouTube but I have low expectations.

olmideso
I've switched to YouTube Music recently and it was pretty good for me. For me it's mostly on par with Google Play Music and on top of that it has a deep integration with Youtube. It allows you to play songs which are uploaded as videos on YouTube which is quite useful if some song/album is missed in the library. The only noticeable downside for me is that your YouTube Music subscriptions appear in YouTube subscriptions list which makes it harder to look for non-music stuff.
cpach
I like Spotify.
peterkos
Same; I paid premium and haven't looked back. Apps are fantastic and the service itself is super straigtforward and has a great catalog.

(Feels so strange to "review" Spotify, haha)

mguerville
Honestly I’m just back to storing my own music and gave up on streaming services. To discover new music though i use mostly Hype Machine, Deezer and Youtube music, just get the actual mp3 for the stuff I like so I am not at the mercy of changing licenses etc.
a_lifters_life
I bought an app Neutron and just play my own music from the hd from my phone. As soon as google music announced this was going to happen I immediately looked for some other solution.
rotterdamdev
Nicotine+, dump files to Google drive, and use Cloudplayer on Android or other desktop program like Clementine to stream your music from.your Google storage.