Moving to My Media from Google Play Music

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naimsayer
Posts: 1
Joined: Sat Jul 25, 2020 9:48 pm

Moving to My Media from Google Play Music

Post by naimsayer »

I've just downloaded the trial version of My Media running on a Qnap NAS x86 and I just wanted to say how totally excellent I found the experience, even for a beta release!

When I purchased my first smart speaker back in 2017 my main requirement was to play my own library of music, mostly FLAC as rips from CD's but with a few 24/96 downloads. I looked at both Google Home and Amazon Alexa, neither seemed able to request tracks directly from NAS but Google Play Music at least allowed me to sync my own music to the cloud and request it from there. This has worked fine for me up until now, and I've added several chromecast audio devices over time.

But Google has just announced the closure of GPM and is forcing a move to YouTube Music. By the end of the year, Google Play Music will be no more. They have made it easy to move your GPM cloud library to YTM, but with on big caveat: you can only continue playing music that you own by paying them £9.99 a month for a YouTube Music subscription! Some people say this is a small price to pay for Google managing your library with up to 100,000 songs but that is missing the point: the only reason I had to upload my music to GPM in the first place was because Google said that was what you had to do so as to be able to ask Google Home to play it!

I'm sure there are plenty of other disgruntled Google customers just like me at the moment. Well, my response was to look for an alternative and My Media for Alexa came up as the best choice, after testing it out first on a Fire TV stick. Well, consider me a new customer! Nothing like it exists for Google Home, so I've chucked that straight in the bin and just gone out and ordered a new Amazon Echo speaker.

The ability to host My Media on QNAP is fantastic; automatic transcoding means no need to make any changes to my Flac library and the ability to stream over the internet is an added bonus!

So, no questions or issues from me as yet, but just wanted to say how easy I found My Media to install on QNAP, although it took quite a few goes to get the skill working on a Fire TV stick due mostly to my total unfamiliarity with Alexa.

Thank you bizmodeller for all your hard work, My Media is exactly what I needed 3 years ago and I'll be purchasing an Advanced Membership tomorrow just as soon as I've picked up my new Amazon Echo device and switched it on - you can say thanks to Google if you like, as without their unwelcome changes to GPM I would not have discovered My Media! :D
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