Yep. I used to be able to play a non-music youtube video on my phone while playing music in the background.
Now it's one or the other, and I can't even get around it by playing music on another device since I use Google Play Music.
Shame Google Play Music is going away, it does some cool things. It lets me upload my own music so I can actually listen to Tool on a streaming service.[0] It lets me build up a collection of music without necessarily endorsing it with a positive rating. And of course it has most albums I go looking for.
But it's a Google product, so of course once it's made its way into your routine it gets canceled. I had hoped that the payment model would delay that a bit longer...
[0]: Tool is super pretentious and says they don't make songs, they make albums. So their music is not available on any services that would allow for buying singles, even if you could also buy the album. It's only available (last I checked) on Pandora where you're going to get nothing but singles and have no ability to listen to the full album.
It's a shame Google Play Music is a Google product. I have it and like it for the same reasons you do, but it is consistently hamstrung by clearly existing primarily to attract enough users to have a somewhat competitive service and gather usage data, not to excel in the market or outdo the competition. At the very least, it's not incentivized to improve much. They've only JUST fixed the UI issue where the 3 dots to select a song's context menu were only several pixels away from the scrollbar, so trying to queue a song could scroll you a mile away in the playlist. But there's a litany of issues that have gotten so frustrating I'm ready to switch.
-Adding a song to a playlist causes the entire playlist to refresh back to the top
-The app is borderline useless without a connection - queuing songs doesn't work, modifying playlists is inconsistent at best, and the app seems to arbitrarily undownload albums
- There's no ability to sort or filter a playlist. Spotify has let you search within a playlist or sort by artist for how many years, and Google can't hash out the same functionality.
-Sometimes modifying playlists seems to desync them between the device and server, or something. I'll click a song, which starts for a brief second and then skips 3-5 songs down the playlist. Likewise, sometimes songs skip halfway through, sometimes they refuse to play at all...This is for me the basic functionality of a music app and GPM fails at it. These problems seem server related because they're 100x worse when casting.
At least it comes with YouTube Red. Though the existing YT Music app inexplicably does not allow you to queue videos on a chromecast. Regular youtube, I can add a dozen music videos to an editable queue. YT music, you must play each individually. Does Google have product managers?
It always kills me when people say things like this about gathering user data. I was an eng. manager on GPM for almost 5 years, and in that entire time I never participated in or even overheard anyone talk about the value of user data when it wasn't in the context of improving our music recommendations. Any benefits that other teams got from our user data were secondary at best, and we didn't really have time to think about that.
It's only my speculation as to why all these deficiencies go unaddressed. It seems to me like GPM is not in any way incentivized to offer a product significantly competitive to other music streaming apps. If they're not even using the usage data, then I've really got no guess on why the app is almost unusable on an airplane.
Thanks for your work on GPM. Don't know when you left the team, but there was a time when it was pretty even to the other offerings and it's still got its qualities. After all, I'm still paying for it.
> If you are a subscriber to Google Play Music, good news, you get a YouTube Music Premium membership as part of your subscription each month. And if you use Google Play Music, nothing will change -- you’ll still be able to access all of your purchased music, uploads and playlists in Google Play Music just like always.
Google Reader, Google Wave, any of whatever chat/video/voice offerings they're planning on killing off in the next year or so. I don't even remember what they're called.
Now it's one or the other, and I can't even get around it by playing music on another device since I use Google Play Music.
Shame Google Play Music is going away, it does some cool things. It lets me upload my own music so I can actually listen to Tool on a streaming service.[0] It lets me build up a collection of music without necessarily endorsing it with a positive rating. And of course it has most albums I go looking for.
But it's a Google product, so of course once it's made its way into your routine it gets canceled. I had hoped that the payment model would delay that a bit longer...
[0]: Tool is super pretentious and says they don't make songs, they make albums. So their music is not available on any services that would allow for buying singles, even if you could also buy the album. It's only available (last I checked) on Pandora where you're going to get nothing but singles and have no ability to listen to the full album.