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Comment by gitweb | Hacker News Reader

Google Music wasn't that good honestly. The only feature that really separated it from others was letting you upload your music. They basically ceased development on it 2 years ago and stopped adding any new functionality.

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I don't disagree that it stagnated, but what kept me on it was the ability to seamlessly blend my own library with GPM's. Now that I've had to switch to Spotify I need to use a separate app for my own library and I hate it.

plex plus tidal is what you probably want to look into.

Is that not still 2 apps?

The Plex app has Tidal integration.

Correct, end of the day you basically have google music if you have plex plus tidal integration. Except now you can do lossless streaming which isn't something google music, youtube music, spotify, (most things) can do. But you can still transcode when using LTE if you want to keep the bandwidth down. Its up to you... bit rate, codec, etc. You're not just stuck with pre-selected lossy formats like mp3 or vorbis. You can use OPUS for example.

> The only feature that really separated it from others was letting you upload your music.

Weirdly, Amazon's online music service started out with this functionality, and eventually removed it.

Google acquired Songza and integrated their playlists into the Play Music product. I think the Songza stuff is pretty good. I also think Play Music's "radio" feature is really good. When you start playing from a playlist it uses that a vector input, trying to find songs related to the whole playlist, instead of just related to one song, album, artist, or other scalar inputs.

I like YouTube for finding new music, and the chance of finding concerts that I attended with a hundred other people 15 years ago. The rest of the time I like listening to entire albums at a time. It was nice to get both with one subscription. Also, though it isn't relevant in 2020, Google Play Music had a better listing of upcoming nearby performances than I was aware of anywhere else.

You could upload your own music to Amazon Music too.

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