In June last year I enthusiastically announced that I had ditched my CD music collection and switched to the Google Play Music app. Since then, my library of albums and individual tracks has blossomed, so that I can now spend many contented hours satisfying my taste for classical, rock, pop, folk, country and Christian music. One day the walls of Chez Angie resound to the sound of a Rachmaninov piano concerto; the next it might be Love Over Gold from Dire Straits. £9.95 per month is hardly inexpensive for a modest music collection like mine, but I willingly pay it for the convenience of having so much good music to hand.
One thing that really makes Google Play Music work for me is it's ability to categorise music by genre, like this...
With one click of a mouse, up comes my Folk Music collection...
As would be expected, YouTube Music comes with a host of new features, though I confess to greeting them with a big yawn.
YouTube Music offers a variety of playlist options now, too, including collaborative playlists built with friends and new programmed playlists built by editors. Assistive technology now also makes personalized suggestions of what to add when you’re building a YouTube Music playlist.
Amid all the hype, though, they have dropped the 'genre' feature. Now I'm greeted with a dreadful jumble like this one – Stainer's Crucifixion, Dire Staits, Flanders & Swan and Carols from Kings, all on one line. Yuk!!
I do marvel that so-called intelligent program developers have no concept of people liking several music genres. But clearly they do not. There are a couple of solutions to this mess:
1. Buy the individual albums and store them on a hard disk. Ultimately, this would be less expensive than forking out £9.95 every month, but I would lose the convenience of being able to access my music with ease on my laptop, my tablet and our two smartphones.
2. Switch to another provider. Spotify is favourite at the moment, though I'm told that its genre category might not be as good as Play Music's. And after I've taken the trouble to move everything across, will some high-ranking idiot from Google take his questionable intelligence to Spotify and mess that up too?
And it was all going so well.
Sorry to hear this, Angie. It's meant to be progress, but the change is clearly for Google's convenience (and profit, no doubt) rather than its users'.
ReplyDeleteI use Samsung's 'Samsung Music' app on my phone, which taps into individual mp3 tracks stored on the microSD card inserted into the phone (which will be taken out and put into my next phone). Samsung Music automatically categorises my 1,800-odd tracks, and I can play them according to categories if I want, e.g. classical, Britpop, and so on. But of course I don't use the convenience of Google Assistant, not even Bixby.
I like to play my music collection in the alphabetical order of the song titles. That way the mood, tempo and style of the music constantly changes, and there are often some startling contrasts. Just right for the bathroom, washing up or doing the ironing!
Lucy