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Comment by standardUser | Hacker News Reader

I'm a Google music devotee (Youtube music now I guess - please stop rebranding) because it allows me to upload my own MP3s and listen to them remotely along with their normal music collection. The app sucks and I'd like to disengage from Google, but a couple hundred album uploads later and I feel pretty locked in.

I wish they would at least improve their god-awful UI. I'd even pay more if it meant basic sorting functionality of my own music library.

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Interesting, I'm surprised they don't hit you with automated copyright claims or something. I wonder if you can use youtube-dl to help 'extricate' your library? I've used it to auto-convert my music playlists into mp3 files, and it's always worked great.

Interesting, I'm typically a curmudgeon with apps (I think most have terrible design) but the YT Music app is IMHO one of the best designed. It somewhat bucks the modern trend of being feature bare and lacking any settings.

It's specifically their UI when working with my own music collection that I find severely lacking. Almost as if they'd prefer I didn't use my own music uploads! I also dislike the UI/UX push towards their own content, when all I want is to search music or listen to my playlists, not "discover" things (aka the Home tab, which it always opens to by default).

Oh yes, ok I completely agree there. The UX for music uploads is atrocious. It's difficult to figure out how to do what you want without googling it, and it's never straightforward like it is for finding their content.

If you're interested in a streaming service for your own music, we're building one here: https://asti.ga

Would love your feedback!

Disclaimer: this is my own commercial service.

I use SyncThing to share my music collection between desktop, phone, and tablet, and use VLC to play them. flac, ogg, mp3, mp4, wma, everything just works. When I add new music it propagates to all devices.

How do you keep battery use low? The default for Syncthing Android is to wake 1x per hour to try to connect to the host machine. It really eats up battery life!

SyncThing for phones? Tablets?! How have I not heard of this?

TIL

I'm the opposite. I used to love the Google Music app until 2015 or so, when they started showing combined libraries with my local files and cloud-based Play Music files. Instant delete.

I'm with you. I used google music from it's initial release until they killed it. I still hate the youtube music app. STOP TRYING TO PLAY VIDEOS. I just want sounds.

I had the same feeling until I noticed there's a setting for this that will disable videos and just do sounds.

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