I had my entire music collection stored on Google Play Music for a time, at one point being my only backup. When I tried to export my music collection, I discovered that not only were the file names and folder structures completely messed up, but I would sometimes get lower bitrate version of the songs or songs with "clean" lyrics - which I know for a fact wasn't what I had originally uploaded.
I refuse to use music streaming services these days - sometimes resorting to less than legal means, but for the most part I purchase drm free music from Bandcamp.
Hey, I can agree with that! I still keep an MP3/FLAC collection I've been building since 2005-ish (when I was a teen). A lot of music has come and gone, but one thing that hasn't changed is that I still use foobar2000[1] on my personal computer to access my collection. Last year, I bought a Raspberry Pi 4 with 4GB of RAM for cheap + an old SSD I had laying around, installed OpenMediaVault[2] on it, connected it to my router via Ethernet, and now I'm able to access my music from all of my home devices. I use RhythmBox on my Linux machines, and I'm pretty sure there's a way to interop with Plex.
I don't have the RPi connected to the internet though. I just load my phone with MP3s like the old days, and open up NewPipe[3] when I want to listen to something I don't have stored.
FYI to anyone else currently using Plex but annoyed with its inability to stream music nicely, there's a separate app called PlexAmp (android and iOS) which works much better.
Backblaze B2 makes sense for large libraries over a few TB, but for 2TB... even Google One with 2TB of storage for Google Drive outcompetes them on pricing. For $99/yr of 2TB of storage, you end up saving $140 per year over Backblaze B2 and rclone is an amazing third-party client, or if you prefer regular snapshot backups then you can use restic.
Since always. For clarity, they are using the commercial offering from backblaze, not backblaze's personal/home use product.
B2 is similar to s3, and B2 charges for api calls + egress. Ingress is free, and they have a generous free daily api calling limit that covers some of the core api
I had a different experience, on export my files were all in the original encoding. The value of Google Play Music was that you could upload files. I have also never had any files replaced.
I have enjoyed self hosted solutions since YouTube Music broke the smart Playlist and integration for uploaded files with steaming files.
When GPM launched, there was definitely no deduplication in place. Even if two users uploaded the same file, there would be two copies — more if you count replication and RS-encoding. It was so because... somebody ordered so.
Perhaps things changed later, but I'm skeptical, because the "somebodies" never change. Also, as recently as a couple of years ago, I noticed broken metadata/cover art in my library that I actually wish YTM would fix for me. I suspect it's more likely that the original bits were/are still in there somewhere and some UI made it harder to get to them. With YTM, accessing your own MP3s is a bit convoluted. I'll give it a shot later tonight, to see if I can download some music that I know to have specific metadata and bitrates.
I know for a fact that YTM still has poor metadata support, the only way to fix it is to reupload the entire file. That's a huge reason why I moved to a self hosted solution. I know there were multiple cases where the metadata was wrong and two separate versions of a song were tagged as the same track. But I never lost any data. I would recommend doing a takeout and exporting all the songs if possible.
I have to imagine Google HAS to dedup on the server side, otherwise even a 100,000 song cap would be too much data to host for free. Google doesn't play ads on uploaded tracks. Google stores not-transcoded music files and has since "Google Music". When GPM first came out, it was a storage locker and felt more like direct competition to Grooveshark than iTunes.
Record companies seem to have a very tight not just on the songs, but also the metadata surrounding them. No service really offers the "radio mode" or suggested tracks for local playback, from what I found. I'd happily give a company playback metadata if in return I got that feature back. I wonder if Pandora has patents for certain parts of music recommendation algorithms. Spotify and YTM can rely heavily on user-generated music connections, but maybe that is why it can't work for local/uploaded files.
> I have to imagine Google HAS to dedup on the server side
It's been a decade since I helped with GPM storage, but one thing I can say is that Google won't dedup anything without the OK from lawyers on _both_ sides, with all the consequences that ensue. Somebody could turn this and similar launches into a TV show, but it wouldn't be as funny as Silicon Valley. On the contrary...
Ditto. I kept >200GB of music on GPM and had no issues with codecs or bitrates getting changed when I had to move away from it (much less being replaced with clean versions).
It definitely butchered my metadata, however. I've spent a couple years now slowly fixing everything.
(I still miss the Play Music iOS app's offline playback, it was miles ahead of anything else)
Honestly, I don't know how to get that much bandwidth, that much space for the same price as a seedbox. I suspect reliability of data is not as good as a proper VPS.
I refuse to use music streaming services these days - sometimes resorting to less than legal means, but for the most part I purchase drm free music from Bandcamp.