I'm so irritated with Google's insistence on
burying perfectly good products.
When it comes to streaming music, I generally prefer Apple Music. Works great, integrates well with most of my hardware, it works as a music locker, and in general it works great. As far as web players go, there's
Musish and
Apple's web player, both of which use the Apple Music streaming web API (MusicKit) and generally work quite well, but there's a hard limit of 15 minutes per song. You can stream music to your heart's content, but the second you put on 2112, Thick As A Brick, or Octavarium (and I listen to all of them fairly often), or even the first track on Periphery's latest album, you can get part of the way through before it just completely seizes up and refuses to do anything. There's already an open issue on Musish's GitHub for it, and I just submitted a bug report to Apple about it, no doubt joining a tiny chorus of progressive and classical music fans.
Obviously, playing long songs works fine on both iTunes and the macOS Music application, but that doesn't help me much when I'm running any form of Linux.
What does this have to do with Google? Well, they're killing off Google Play Music at the end of this year in favor of YouTube Music. Google Play Music is a mature, functional, and reliable web app and music locker. It works well, has excellent audio quality (sounds as good as Apple Music to me) and has a solid UI.
Clearly, Google doesn't want any part in having a finished, reliable product, since they're shitcanning it in favor of YouTube Music, which is kind of a piece of crap. It features the same sound quality, sure, but that's about the only thing it shares with its predecessor. It supposedly lets you import your existing library and uploaded music, but I couldn't get that to work. The UI is a mess, with everything appearing overly large like it was designed to be used on a TV, with an ugly light gray on black font which offers way too much contrast, with no light theme available (which doesn't impact me, admittedly, but it's awful for people with certain vision problems). Not sure why they didn't just use the same light/dark theme as YouTube, but hey. Google.
The way it handles user accounts is a complete disaster as well. Instead of being tied to your entire Google account like Play Music, it's tied to your YouTube
channel. This is kind of a big problem. For one, it will only let you upload music to your primary Google account, which is generally under one's real name, and when you change your channel on YouTube Music it changes your channel on YouTube as well! Second, I couldn't even get music uploading to work at all, even when I tried using Chrome. It would take its time uploading music before just coming up with a generic, impossible to troubleshoot error. Third, whenever you follow an artist on YouTube Music, it automatically follows them on YouTube as well. Uhhh, yeah, way to inflate my already unmanageable subscription account, Google. In addition to that, their subscription system is just buggy. It auto-subscribed me to Don Henley on YouTube Music (note that I'm not subbed to him on YouTube itself), isn't giving me the option to unsubscribe. Apparently it felt like I listened to
the Boys of Summer enough to warrant that. What's worse is that it also auto-subbed me to The Ataris because I made the mistake of listening to their cover version once (an uptempo cover of a song about wistfully looking back at the past? Really?).
I tried for a week to use it before just outright giving up. It
sucks, and knowing how Google operates they'll have it to a semi-functional state by around 2026, by which point they'll have damned it to the ever-growing graveyard.
I wasn't particularly keen on paying for another service (I pay for Apple Music, and I get Google's weekly offering along with my YouTube Premium subscription), but I decided to pay for Spotify for a month to see how it's doing in good ol' 2020. Let's just say, I'm more than a bit shocked to hear that they're using 320kbps Vorbis. Either Vorbis is really that much worse than AAC (doubtful!) or Spotify is doing something really, really wrong in their encoding process. Mids and treble sound overly harsh on everything I play, with the bass being a muddy mess. I've tried listening using both speakers and my headphones (Focal Elex, with a JDS Element II amp) and I get the same results on both. I figured it might just be an issue with the Linux Spotify client, but it sounds the same on the iOS app as well (with my phone connected digitally to my amp so that there's no headphone adapter bias). I'm not exaggerating when I say that I have 192kbps MP3s that I encoded in 2002 that sound better than that.
However, Spotify can play songs more than 15 minutes in length, and has a far better UI than YouTube Music (even if it is a little quirky compared to literally everything else). So, what do I do for my Tux Boxes? Use Spotify/YouTube Music for my progressive bullshit and use Apple Music for everything else? Ugh. Thanks, I hate it.
Oh, and I already tried running iTunes in a Windows VM (under both VMware and KVM). Yeah, that doesn't work particularly well. You either end up with stuttering for days (direct console into the VM) or a severe drop in sound quality (RDP audio forwarding).
Kinda thinking that the best long-term thing would be for Apple to fix their damn API. I have a hard time believing that they wouldn't have run into this at some point during their internal testing. Who knows, maybe their testing involved throwing the Billboard Top 100 at it and calling it a day. :|