I just removed my Google Home devices and migrated my music service to Tidal because of this whole YouTube Music debacle. Went like this:
1. Suddenly my Google Home would only use YouTube Music when playing to the Chromecast on my TV.
2. YouTube Music, among a bunch of other terrible UX issues around how it considers music to be organized/related, has the extremely annoying quality of always playing videos of the music instead of just the music.
3. Turns out there's an option in your account settings to tell it to only play audio, no videos.
4. Also, turns out this setting has zero effect when playing through a Chromecast, and thus the damnable videos persist.
5. So, I said, "Eff it!" and signed up for a Hi-Fi Tidal account (the audio quality improvement is immediately apparent, BTW) to replace my Google Play Music... er, YouTube Music instigated brewing household clusterf*ck (the chance was screwing with my wife & two little kids' ability to listen to music with the ease and predictability they had with Google Play Music).
6. I can cast Tidal to the Chromecast from my phone, so I figured I could link it in my Google Home device, and our household music situation would be basically back to normal. Nope...NOPE!
7. You can't set Tidal as a music service for your Google Home, which turned me into the family's sporadic impromptu disc jockey throughout the day, and entirely broke the kids' ability to manage their own music enjoyment.
8. Turns out Amazon's device ecosystem doesn't have this problem, so the Chromecast got replaced with a Fire TV stick and an Alexa pod.
In one felled swoop, via the most utterly existentially dubious product rollout and migration, Google managed to motivate me to eat the switching cost of replacing 100% of their hardware and 100% of their media services from my family's life. Truly a spectacular "own goal" on Google's behalf... and for what? What is even the point of YouTube Music?
I really want to like Tidal but I can't support Tidal's endorsement of MQA[1] - an audiophile scam and an attempt to lock music into yet another proprietary format. While they still use it, I won't sign up and I'll continue to dissuade others from doing so.
I tried Deezer, Spotify, Amazon, and Tidal in one day. Tidal had the best mix of predictable intuitive behavior, easy to use UI, and as a bonus it seemed to have the best sound quality.
Though this may not be all that obvious in most setups, it just so happens that one of the persistent relics of a bygone era in my life, when I had more money than brains, is an underappreciated (I mean our TV is hooked to it and plays rounds and rounds of, "We are the Dinosaurs" children's classic), but almost-embarassingly high-end stereo system.
I use Plex to store my TV, Movies, and Music. One nice feature is that you can have your own music AND integrate Tidal to augment your music collection. It works pretty well.
Oh? No kidding? I think my TrueNAS machine has a way to setup Plex pretty easily. Maybe I'll give that a shot this weekend. That machine incidentally already has all my old lossless CD rips on it as an archive from before I uploaded them all to Google.
1. Suddenly my Google Home would only use YouTube Music when playing to the Chromecast on my TV.
2. YouTube Music, among a bunch of other terrible UX issues around how it considers music to be organized/related, has the extremely annoying quality of always playing videos of the music instead of just the music.
3. Turns out there's an option in your account settings to tell it to only play audio, no videos.
4. Also, turns out this setting has zero effect when playing through a Chromecast, and thus the damnable videos persist.
5. So, I said, "Eff it!" and signed up for a Hi-Fi Tidal account (the audio quality improvement is immediately apparent, BTW) to replace my Google Play Music... er, YouTube Music instigated brewing household clusterf*ck (the chance was screwing with my wife & two little kids' ability to listen to music with the ease and predictability they had with Google Play Music).
6. I can cast Tidal to the Chromecast from my phone, so I figured I could link it in my Google Home device, and our household music situation would be basically back to normal. Nope...NOPE!
7. You can't set Tidal as a music service for your Google Home, which turned me into the family's sporadic impromptu disc jockey throughout the day, and entirely broke the kids' ability to manage their own music enjoyment.
8. Turns out Amazon's device ecosystem doesn't have this problem, so the Chromecast got replaced with a Fire TV stick and an Alexa pod.
In one felled swoop, via the most utterly existentially dubious product rollout and migration, Google managed to motivate me to eat the switching cost of replacing 100% of their hardware and 100% of their media services from my family's life. Truly a spectacular "own goal" on Google's behalf... and for what? What is even the point of YouTube Music?