Weening Myself off Google Play Music
I have a love/hate relationship with Google Play Music. As I noted last year in my streaming music service comparison, Google Play Music is the best music streaming service for me. It runs on all the platforms I use (including Android Auto for in my car), allows me to upload my own music, and in the last year it even added podcast support. The podcast catalog isn’t the most extensive, but all the shows I subscribe to are present.
But I loathe the Play Music application. The interface is ugly (to me), with an orange and white palette that I can’t help but dislike. The white interface is especially troublesome because it blinds me nearly every night when I am trying to navigate to my bedtime playlist and set a sleep timer. The UI itself hasn’t seen an overhaul since 2014 except with the addition of a new homescreen in late 2016. Said homescreen is nice, but tailored to those that listen to music stations. I understand the merit in this but when I listen to music, I either dive into my song list or load one of my two playlists.
There are a boatload of music applications with developers that have far less resources than Google, and nearly all of them give the user control over what screen is loaded when the user opens the application. Nearly all of those applications give the user control over what theme is used for the application, as well. Finally, Google Play Music still has the idiotic restriction on the amount of devices a user has registered to their account. Other services have this restriction as well because of licensing agreements, but Play Music is the only service that only allows users to remove up to 10 devices per calendar year. We’re only halfway through the year, and I’ve already hit my deauthorization limit.
The straw that broke the proverbial back — outside of a high dose of curiosity — is the news that a recent update broke the application in horrendous ways, and the fix for this bug is to toggle Bluetooth off and back on. Not the most difficult fix by any means, and the issue has since been patched. But it’s discouraging to see something like that make it past Google’s internal testing. So, I set out to replace the good parts of Google Play Music with another set up.
First, I noted the features I need from a music application. It isn’t a requirement, but my ideal music application would have an integrated podcast feature. There are plenty of podcast applications for Android — I particularly love Pocket Casts — but one less application on my phone is always nice. One must have is support for Android Auto, which substantially narrows the available selection. Next, some sort of cloud sync solution is required because this in 2017 and I’m not plugging my phone into my computer. A cloud backup is also ideal in the event the hard drives in my server PC ever die. Finally, being able to customize the interface — at the very least, a dark theme option — is needed.
I turned to apps I used in the past as my basis. I went ahead and downloaded Pocket Casts since I didn’t think I would find a suitable music application that also had podcast integration. I signed back into my account, and all the podcasts I subscribe to began to download. For music itself, I downloaded Shuttle+, Phonograph, Rocket Player, CloudPlayer and doubleTwist. I’ve used all of these in the past, so I figured they would be a good starting point. All of these allow for some level of theme selection, from the simple dark theme/light theme selection in CloudPlayer and doubleTwist, to a full color picker in Shuttle+ and Phonograph, to downloadable themes in Rocket Player. Of these, I prefer the full color picker in Shuttle+ and Phonograph.
Next, I decided to tackle the cloud sync issue. I used Google’s Music Manager application to download my library to my Windows PC, then reuploaded them to my Google Drive account. This meant purchasing the songs and albums I had added to Play Music through the subscription service. To avoid a bunch of $1.38 charges to me debit card — which my bank assumes is fraud and disables my debit card — I just purchased $75 worth of Google Play gift cards and added those to my account. Alternatively, I could have just purchased all the songs on Amazon MP3 since that allows users to bundle everything in a cart and only have one credit card charge. Of the music players I downloaded, only CloudPlayer offers integrated cloud syncing. Users can connect their Dropbox, Google Drive, or OneDrive accounts to the application to download music and playlists. That sounds perfect, but has an unintended side effect of downloading every .mp3 file in my Google Drive. So alongside my music, it also downloads recordings I made for school.
After trying that, I decided to try an application called FolderSync. As the name implies, FolderSync allows users to synchronize any folder from a cloud service to the user’s phone. I connected the application to my Google Drive account, and set the “Music” folder in Google Drive to synchronize to the “Music” folder on my phone. FolderSync allows for additional options such as a scheduled sync, synchronizing deletions, and whether or not to sync on mobile data. Finally, FolderSync has a built in file browser, so I was able to uninstall Solid Explorer. I love Solid Explorer and it is the better file browser, but as with the podcast applications, one less application on my phone is preferred.
With cloud syncing solved, I moved onto deciding just which application I would listen to the music through. The main criteria is the application needs Android Auto support, which rules out the vast majority of music players. I did some digging and came upon AnyAutoAudio, an application from XDA user jvvpc. AnyAutoAudio uses Android’s notification listening system to make any music player compatible with Android Auto. The user begins playback of the music with their desired application, plugs their device into the Android Auto unit, and AnyAutoAudio transmits the playback and controls to Android Auto. It’s brilliant from a development perspective, and even though it’s only an Alpha-level release, many users on XDA were able to get it working.
I, however, was not. I tried it with Phonograph and it did not work. Shuttle+ also did not work, and that application also could not read my local music folder for some reason. So by process of elimination, DoubleTwist earned its place on my phone. That’s not to say DoubleTwist is a bad option, by any means. It features the discussed theming option, works with Android Auto, and has an integrated podcast selection. For podcasts, DoubleTwist uses a standard RSS feed browser rather than requiring content creators to upload their podcast recordings to a separate server like Google Play Music. This means there is a much wider selection of podcasts than Google Play Music, and new episodes will typically show up in DoubleTwist first.
The last step was the most time consuming: manually rebuilding my Workout and Bedtime playlists. I used a desktop application called Musicbee to edit the titles of the songs I just purchased — removing unnecessary (to me) descriptions such as “(Remastered 2008)” from the song titles — and to rebuild my playlists. Musicbee saves playlists as .m3u files, and DoubleTwist reads those file types just as expected. I had my Google Play Music library opened in Chrome and pinned to the left side of my monitor, and Musicbee pinned to the right side of my monitor. Adding songs to each playlist was as easy as holding the Ctrl key, clicking on the songs I needed, and right clicking to add them to their respective playlists. Once the playlists were complete, the .m3u files synchronized to my Google Drive folder, then to the music folder on my phone. DoubleTwist recognized the files right away, and my playlists were loaded.
In the end, everything I described above took maybe two or three hours of actual work, though it was spread over the course of a week. It’s definitely more difficult than just continuing to use the Google Play Music application, but now I’m using an application with an interface that I can customize, I have my own cloud syncing solution, and I’m back to actually owning the music I listen to. If for some reason I want to try using a different music application with a different feature set, all my leg work is already done. I still have my Google Play Music subscription because I’m part of a friend’s family plan, so I can listen to a song or album a few times before buying it.
