I’m cleaning out my gmail folders this weekend, and went deep into the archive to 2011, when I got my invite to Google Music.
It’s funny, because I just (November) moved all of my music out of cloud and back to local-only. Amazon was the last straw, when I tried to play purchased music, and was forced to listen to it on shuffle with other songs not of my choosing.
Anyway… there was a time when Google (ahem, Youtube) Music was set to be a game-changer. Imagine if enshittification wasn’t a thing.
terrible. I thought I would never need a copy of my music files again - They’re uploaded to Google so it’s all good.
When it crashed, it was an extreme hassle to download the several gigs, I ended up storing them on a phone temporarily, which then died and is likely not recoverable. I lost some rare and unique recordings like the music from my old band that I recorded.
Maintaining this would have been a pittance for Google.
I thought all Google Music was transferred to YouTube Music. You might still have those files in your library.
Thanks! it turns out that it is all there!
I never bothered to setup a YT Music account, so I never realized that the uploaded music was still available. I know this is a very niche problem, but just in case anyone is searching and comes across this:
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Yes, Google Music uploads are saved in your YouTube Music files. You already have a Google account, so you can set it up with the same login to gain access to the files.
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On desktop, open “Library” on the left -> select “Uploads” tab at the top.
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Sort by “Album,” “Artist,” or “Song” to see the entire library.
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When searching, etc., it will default back to the YT Music streaming service. Manually select the “Uploads” tab after each operation.
It is also possible to download your music library (although not individual songs, etc.) from YT Music, although is is not obvious.
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Navigate to https://takeout.google.com/ while logged into the same Google account.
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Click on “Deselect all” (unless you wish to download ALL of your google related data.
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Select “YouTube and YouTube Music” at the bottom of the list
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Click “All YouTube data included,” then select “music-uploads” as well as “music-library-songs” (if you have any music acquired through Google)
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Follow the prompts to receive your files. You can choose to repeat this process as a periodic backup, or a one time download as a .zip (or set of .zip files). You can download them to your PC via email link, or you can have them directly transferred to another cloud service (Box, Dropbox, Google Drive, and OneDrive as of now)
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This process can take a while.
Good luck, and enjoy!
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I would give anything to get back the I’m Feeling Lucky button for music. It generated so many fantastic spontaneous playlists.
I literally just want to sort my liked music by the number of times it’s been played. I really, really miss that feature.
Does anyone else remember when Gmail was invite only and you only got like 10 invites?
It’s how I snagged a “firstname.lastname” address. No numbers or anything! All the other people with my exact name out there can fuck off!
Yeah I snagged one too; but all the people with that name seem to have made variations of it, and when they give it out, either they forget their own email address or the person they give it to just mishears and simplifies to first name.lastname. Needless to say I receive a lot of junk intended for other people.
I have a first and last name email on Gmail and I had some dbag email me telling me if I didn’t hand over the email to him he was going to sign my account up for every spam service he could find also claimed he was going to hack my account but the brute force attempts and phishing emails didn’t work. This was a few years ago and I still get a ton of spam on that account and Google doesn’t have a solution for it so the account just sits there unused. I will take that email to my grave before I let some jackass in the internet get what he wants.
And as a bonus you snagged firstnamelastname without realising.
This alone makes Gmail a better service than most providers. All of the similar but different address confusions avoided.
It really should be standard practice.
Oh I know.
There’s someone with a variation of my first name (think “Steven” versus “Steve”) who absolutely cannot get their shit sorted and gives out my address as theirs all over the place using “longerFirstNameLastname” but fucks it up and uses my address instead. I tried emailing them directly once letting them know, got accused of “hacking their google” and now I just delete some important looking emails like travel reservations and digital gift card redemption things for Xbox.
It was amazing.
Fuck YouTube music. It fucking sucks. Someone needs to remind Google that when you replace something with something else, it’s supposed to be better, not worse.
They decided which one is better for them.
Honest question as someone who didn’t get the chance to use Google Music and now uses YouTube Music: what are the downsides of YTM? What was Google Music better at?
I can’t speak specifically to YouTube Music. But Google Music allowed you to upload I think it was 50,000 of your own songs. And at the time it supported really good audio quality.
The app was also simple and clean. I don’t remember seeing all kinds of ads or suggestions for featured artists, podcasts, etc. Spotify seems a lot busier than what I remember with Google Music. That being said I mostly used Google Music to stream my personal library.
Remember when the Intenet made you optimistic? That’s why I think these posts gut me so much. Because it doesn’t do that anymore.
Anyway off to continue doom scrolling.
“The internet will bring us all together! It will democratize truth and information!” Was the manta of the 2000s.
20 years later and the exact opposite happened.
to be fair i would say that the internet largely has made information significantly more democratic & accessible. truth, not so much…
although i definitely do count the fact that you need to know how to spot & deal with misinformation and especially disinformation and differentiate it from valid information in order to safely use the internet, as a very big accessibility problem currently. Most people aren’t growing up learning that on their own, and it’s certainly not well taught.
It was the best! GPM’s demise was an abomination.
It’s right choice from google to discontinued google music because they already have YouTube, so…in the end it kinda redundant to have separate platform IMO
Nowadays i just use seal + YouTube for music, because some music that i saved from YouTube Music can’t be played unless i used YouTube
Google Music let you buy and download non DRMd albums, which ladt I checked isn’t a thing on YT music.
But unlike YouTube Music, Google Play Music for mostly for buying the music. Very different service.
Yup, it was one of the worst “someone’s getting promo and the users are getting screwed” Google decisions.
Anyone remember this list?
https://www.reddit.com/r/googleplaymusic/comments/icmwdf/one_comprehensive_list_of_youtube_music/
Used to use GPM now use Tidal. Wish it was as cheap as old GPM but the quality is excellent.
Deezer is also pretty good
Oh that’s right forgot about them, should see if their catalogue stacks up well against them
This and Zune were peak music.
I argue plexamp is getting close to this as well. Although I use Synfonium with Plex which is also a very smooth experience.
GPM is still untouched though. Even if was a rollercoaster waiting for a new client just to have YTM end everything we liked about it.
Where do you find the music to add to it? YouTube rips?
My account migrated seamlessly, had no problems at all. I like it still.
Yt music does the same thing though, I still send my downloaded songs to it, I really don’t get what was so special about the old version.
The previous version was a music management and playback platform that had a store and subscription available. The current version is a subscription-selling platform with rudimentary music management and playback features. You can no longer buy an album, only subscribe. God help you if you want to do anything with playlists.
Also it uses YouTube’s algorithm to do random play based on a song. It sucks so bad it’s not even funny. With repeated songs and songs that have nothing to do with the song you started with. And if one of the songs in the list is sorta popular it’s just stuck in a loop of the most dreadful popsongs.
Not to mention wanting to play videos the whole time, where I only want to listen to music as implied by the name YouTube Music. And it mixes your video history on YouTube with the music history, so randomly it will start suggesting songs when you want to watch video.
It’s like someone at YouTube decided that watching videos and listening to music is basically the same thing or close enough. It’s utterly moronic.
When google music was consolidated into YouTube music it was a slightly worse experience, but mostly it somehow just ruined all of my playlists and made them unusable both on music and YouTube.
Slightly? I hated it and switched to Spotify
Me too. I would’ve probably used Google Play Music to the end of my days but the transition to Youtube Music was so good awful I cancelled and switched to Spotify within a couple of days.
From what I can tell, the core issue with YouTube music is that it is restricted to the same API end points as default YouTube. Their api for playlist management just sucks and a lot of client side caching and workarounds are required to make it at all feel okay to use.
True random is hidden. They auto play videos and/or rape my data with downloads when I specifically tell it not to.
I was a big fan of GrooveShark. I thought they could have transitioned to the paid system, but weren’t able to.
