I love music. It’s incredibly rare that I’m ever not listening to something (music or podcast). Between walking to work, hammering away at the code, walking home, driving long distances and doing chores, my life has a soundtrack.
And up until earlier this week, I would have been listening to music via Google Play’s service. I’d dabbled with Spotify for a while but being an Android user I moved over a while back to take advantage of Google Play’s better (at the time) app and the ability to store my own music on there. This last feature was a massive draw. My MP3 collection is something I’ve been building since I got my first iPod way back in 2004. Even if the quality is meh, it’s still got a bit of an emotional link. Even some of the audio issues have become familar.
However, Google Play Music as a system is… lacking. To put it nicely, Google is being Google and trying to get everyone onto Youtube Music by making Google Play Music unbearable. I don’t there has been a major update to it in the last year and it’s just clunky. All the little niggles and annoyances had started to pile up but I was pretty set on riding Google Play Music straight into hell (much like I had done with Google Reader).
There was, however, a final straw. Expecting the incredibly unique tone of La Roux, I was horrified to find Google had decided to replace it in my online library with a sound-a-like. The same had also happened to several Queen songs.
So 20 minutes after this discovery I was back on Spotify Premium (for the first time in several years), copying all my playlists via Soundizz and enjoying Spotify’s much-improved client. It seems my MP3 collection will now just have to live on my NAS, there for the day when the internet dies.