Alternative to Amazon Music Library?

December 13, 2016 11:36 AM

I'm currently paying Amazon money each year to host my own music, and it's ok, but the upload/macOS client is consistently flaky. Does anyone here use a different service for hosting music that they already own, and love it? What is it? I have a DropBox account with enough capacity, but I'm not aware of any great clients tailored for music playing. I'd like to not host my own out of a home NAS--that is not an option. Clients must run on iOS and macOS.
posted by sandettie light vessel automatic to Computers & Internet (9 answers total)

Google Music has generally worked fairly well for me. 25,000 song upload limit, I believe, which has been plenty enough storage space.
posted by CrystalDave at 11:42 AM on December 13, 2016 [4 favorites]

I use Google Play Music. It's commercial free and I don't pay anything so... you know the saw about if you're getting something free then you're the product?

IIRC the uploader uses "Scan and Match" so it only really uploads music that's not already in the Google Library
posted by ElGuapo at 11:43 AM on December 13, 2016 [2 favorites]

You could also spend $2.99 a month for 100 GB and just store it all in Google Drive, which has sync clients for iOS and macOS.

Google Music limits how often you can download your own music, so it's not really a great back up service in my opinion. It's fine as a streaming service though. I double sync - with my music in both places. Google Music as a convenient way to stream my collection, Google Drive as an actual backup. There are browser extensions that allow you to streak right from Drive, but I haven't tried any of them.
posted by COD at 12:00 PM on December 13, 2016 [1 favorite]

Google's not bad. I'm obsessive about using replaygain to normalize the volume on my files but either Google doesn't honor that mp3 setting or the "scan and match" mentioned above screws it up since I don't get to really listen to my copies of songs. But the service is free and that's the only significant issue I've encountered so I can't complain too much.
posted by ElKevbo at 12:01 PM on December 13, 2016

iTunes Match. (i've been using it for the past few years)

iirc, $25/year
posted by osi at 12:14 PM on December 13, 2016 [1 favorite]

Response by poster: I forgot to add that I am pretty iTunes-averse. I think I may give Google Drive a shot. Thanks for the responses, everyone!
posted by sandettie light vessel automatic at 12:45 PM on December 13, 2016

Nthing Google Music. i had previously uploaded a ton of my music, but its cumbersome to create playlists using their interface, so I wiped it out, and started uploading 'playlists' and marking the last uploaded (up to 500) to the proper playlist(s). Playlists are limited to 1000 songs, but thats plenty. Working well for me now.
posted by edman at 9:56 AM on December 14, 2016

IIRC the uploader uses "Scan and Match" so it only really uploads music that's not already in the Google Library

I don't believe this is true. I use google music and have a couple of custom songs on there, including the MeFi album that came out a while ago. I think it will scan and match so it only has to upload unknown albums.
posted by zabuni at 1:44 PM on December 14, 2016

I used Amazon until the futziness of its MacOS uploadrer killed it for me AND when iTunes music Match went to 100,000 song limit.

I love iTunes Music Match, but imagine it will not be around all that long. I recently spoke to a CSR at Apple who told me not a lot of people use it? Oh well. For me I really want to be able to upload files as a good portion of my library is ROIS.

With that said, PLEX recently started supporting Dropbox, so if I have enough DropBox room, that might be a contender.

So far, pretty happy with Music Match, I believe in staying with Apple products when I can.

Good luck

Henry
posted by silsurf at 3:45 PM on December 16, 2016