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"The offline playback stuff continues to be pretty clunky to set up. If I know I am going on a road trip and will be driving out of range, actually adding that music to the device is a huge pain, and often the easiest way is just to leave the device playing music for days and let it build up a cache. Horrible."

It's not obvious but the way to do this is to "pin" (aka mark as keeping for offline) playlists on the device. Create a few travel playlists, pin them on the device, put the device on wifi or change the data settings in the app, go to the web client and mass drag and drop songs onto the travel playlists. I manage about 6 GB worth of offline music this way and it works decently. Once in a while you have to go into settings and tap "Refresh Music" to get it to recognize a new playlist but I maybe do that once a month.

This is my favorite feature of the service (Spotify has this, as well). The best part is you can pin a playlist and it auto-updates when you add songs. When I'm going out of the country I'll create a 'Trip to XX' playlist, pin it, and then over the days/weeks leading up to the trip add things to it. The app auto-downloads as you do so.

It also does it across devices! I have a crappy old smartphone w/o a sim card that I use for running, and have a running playlist pinned to it.

I can be listening at work, add a song to the playlist, and then back at home the device automatically downloads the new song over wifi for when I go running. (I'm sure spotify does this too)

> - Family plan. I want to pay $15/month and give it to my wife and kid.

This is what's stopping me from paying for it. I already pay for Pandora, and my wife and I are able to share that. Sharing an entire google account isn't going to happen.

Linking Google accounts might but you're right it has high potential to get "Netflixed" with people sharing the service amongst their friends.

> What does YouTube have to do with Google Play Music anyway? YouTube is ad supported, Google Play isn't. There is no cross-over.

There is actually cross-over, whether you like it or not (most people don't). Youtube Music Key: https://www.youtube.com/musickey

http://lifehacker.com/whats-the-point-of-youtube-music-key-1...

Fair enough. But it is still a bug that even after pausing All Access, YouTube takes a complete reload to work.

It's pretty nice to not have to deal with ads while watching live shows, music videos, etc on youtube. For me it was a welcomed addition to what I was already paying for.

Play Music's Youtube integration is a pointless distraction that makes me less likely to continue to pay for the service, not more.

If I want to watch music videos I'll go to the Youtube app. So damn annoying when I accidently tap the play video hover button when I really meant to swipe to the next song.

If it weren't for YouTube's popularity I'd say the integration was a sign of desperation.

> whether you like it or not (most people don't)

I say YouTube is probably the number one way most teenagers actually listen to music. This isn't music videos mostly. It is pictures of the cover art and the music. I seriously listen to my music through YouTube in another and I am rarely disappointed in not finding the music I am looking for.

What is not to like. I can listen with the screen turned off. I use this feature to listen to one off podcast I would like to list to and the YouTube play list made by users are amazing. Also to have no ads while listening to YouTube music is great.

There used to be a feature in the youtube app for android to enable background play. It was removed because now they want you to pay for it. That's not to like.

No ads is nice, but useless for anyone who is willing/able to install an ad blocker on their phone. You can promote content producers more effectively by spending the money you would drop on a subscription on buying an album, going to a show, subscribing on Twitch or becoming a patron on Gratipay anyway.

Offline access is nice, but other commentors claim it's "clunky", and if it's not especially convenient, then it doesn't give me anything I havent been able to do for the last decade with youtube downloader apps.

So really all it does is make the mobile background play a paid feature, which is obnoxious.

Further, they started banning apps that used the YouTube API to background audio when YouTube's v3 API shipped last month.

It's very anti-user, I use it to listen to longer podcasts in the background.

Worth rooting for: http://repo.xposed.info/module/com.pyler.youtubebackgroundpl...

It was never an official API it was a goo hack.

http://kaeruct.github.io/posts/how-to-use-the-youtube-js-api...

A family plan is so sorely needed, even more so on other the Play properties. I don't buy Play books because I can't share them. TV shows are a pain because we have to watch every episode together.

In addition, you can't gift things. There's been several occasions I've wanted to gift apps and games to people I know.

All of this, and I'd also love a way to pin radio stations.

Google Music keeps track of every radio station you create and listen to, but it is sorted by last played in a single list.

I have 10 radio stations that I really enjoy, but I try to not try out too many new ones in case I lose the ones I really like. It has happened a few times.

The "save queue" option is nice... but it destroys any discoverability off that station because it is now a static playlist.

You can pin radio stations. Unfortunately it only grabs a handful of songs at the top of the playlist. So dumb.

Edit: Radio station downloading now seems to grab at least twice the amount it used to. Which puts it firmly in the "meh" category when it comes to usefulness.

Yeah "Google Play Music All Access Unlimited" is a truly horrible product name (not to mention un-Googleable if you mix up even one of the words).

For a company that understands Google searchability very well (since they wrote the search engine itself), this has a certain kind of irony.

What does YouTube have to do with Google Play Music anyway?

You may not have noticed if you use an adblocker, but your Google Music subscription now removes ads on music videos on YouTube (as well as the ability to save videos offline on your Android device)

>You keep "simplifying" away functionality.

Could you explain what you have lost exactly ?

>The offline playback stuff continues to be pretty clunky to set up.

What is your issue with it ? In my experience, it works fairly well.

I am genuinely curious

I pinned some albums to download them to my device. I paused that for a bit.

....

I don't how to make it start downloading them again.

Sidebar > Settings > Manage Downloads (at least on Android).

I agree that this is sub-optimal, but I think up until recently it was actually impossible unless you started another download and tapped the notification.

This.

I sometimes start syncing an album before commuting. It stumble and stops in the metro but starts again by itself afterwards.

I am not sure what the default behavior of the app is. Probably to only download while on wifi, so it does not kill your data allocation. Again, you need to go in the settings in order to change this. Better than having angry users I guess.

I want to add Last.fm scrobbling - I don't understand why Apple, Amazon, and Google ignore this.

I use the last.fm app and it detects everything very well from Google Play, both from the All Access service and my own downloaded songs. Have you tried that yet?

I do use it, but it's not too challenging to have this natively supported.

There's also https://github.com/tgwizard/sls

I agree that the offline playback is clunky. I don't want to have to remember to pin stuff, or try to build up a cache. I just want to allocate some local storage and have most-recently-played cache of songs. If I allocate a couple of GB of storage that would be plenty of music for a road trip.

Is that a lot different from what happens now? Right now if you check the "Cache during playback", you'll get the recent songs saved. Also anything that's pinned is always saved. What goes out of cache is a bit magic, but it's unlikely to be the very recent stuff.

I think the difference that I would like is to have the offline cache on the phone sync to my playlist history across devices. So, if I'd been listening on the web client, or another device, then I'd like my phone to download all those recently-played songs and just have them available.

I agree with almost all of these, except that I like the new UI.

offline works great for me on Android and is pretty simple to set up. are you on iOS?