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Forced to subscribe to YouTube Music to stream to Chromecast

3 points by julesallen ↗ HN
Google Music is going away and I was asked to move my music and playlists over to YT Music. Fair enough. I mostly stream my own collection and am one of the 13 people left on the planet who still buys music as it's better margins for the artist.

Turns out you can't stream anything to chromecast audio devices without a YT Music subscription (desktop/Chrome doesn't have this limitation).

So I normally shrug at the Google abandonment threads as software is mutable and everything goes away eventually. But this is an artificial limitation that forces us to lease access to the hardware we've already paid for.

Not thrilled in a large way. Next phone will probably be an iPhone, next speakers will probably be Sonos, and the Pixelbook is likely to be my last Google hardware chromebook.

(Solution: move music to a QNAP NAS and stream it from there.)

What are you using for streaming your owned music these days?

4 comments

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crmrc114
I use plex to stream music to my chromecast's without issue. I buy my music on Amazon in mp3 format. I dont buy music to support the artist primarily. I just dont trust streaming services to keep my music on there for 20+ years. My library will be around longer.
julesallen
Plex, that's a good idea. I tried it on my QNAP NAS and the connector is too old to be useful (couldn't get https to work reliably and opening a port to the outside world just wouldn't work). What are you streaming from?
crmrc114
I have a rackmount server running centos, however many people like to stream from pi's or nvidia shields with external hard drives.

https://support.plex.tv/articles/221099648-limitations-when-...

https://www.ionos.com/digitalguide/server/configuration/rasp....

Plex also automatically backs up my family's photos to the server so we dont have to use just google cloud.. though I use both google cloud and plex. (I wanted the full res copies of my photos and videos without google scaling) I should also mention emby works well and I have friends on that side of the camp who are very happy if you dont want to use plex on philosophical reasons. (Closed Source v. Open Source)