The reason that this frustration returned is my phone. As you can read here in my last post about getting music into Nina, I decided that hooking up my Pixel 4 to the car and just using Google Play Music would be good and easy enough. But I've explained here that I wasn't happy with the Pixel 4. Well with all the extra cash I'm getting because of the 'Rona, I decided to take care of that phone problem.
A quick aside, I don't think I deserve this much extra money during this pandemic crisis. Like most others, I've gotten my $1200 stimulus check. I'm also getting $750 a pay period extra from work as an essential worker. On top of those, I don't have to pay my student loans for six months and have no incentive to make extra payments. I'm in a program where if I make 120 payments, I get the rest of my loans forgiven. I have to be on a payment plan linked to my finances, but it was still less per month than I was paying before. Well, the government made it so student loans were given a six month pandemic forbearance. During those six months there would be no interest building up, and those six months of not paying would still count as six payments toward the 120. In other words, I get over $2400 for NOT paying my student loans without penalty. I can't put an exact figure on how much extra money I'm getting as I don't know how long I'll get the extra $750 a pay period, but it's in excess of $5000 extra. I know some or even many people need economic help during these times, but I'm working and I don't need the help. That doesn't mean I'm not going to take the money and run with it.
Anywho, I have cash burning a hole in my online account, so I figured I'd take care of this whole phone thing. I looked hard at the Oneplus 8 and Oneplus 8 Pro, but while they're impressive for android devices, they didn't strike me as better than the pixel. They'd be a little better on battery but I wouldn't get the battery gain I was looking for without turning off the 90 or 120 hz screens. So I threw those out. I then went down the Apple hole.
I first got the idea of taking care of the phone problem when I saw Apple was releasing the iPhone SE (second generation). It's more or less an iPhone 8 with all new internals and goes for only $399. $449 with the memory that would make me happy. That is damned reasonable... but it came with a lot of little issues. The screen was only 4.7 inches. I'd be moving down from my Pixel 4 XLs 6.3 inch screen. It also had no face ID, which I'd really gotten used to. It also had a lower quality LCD screen as opposed to the high quality OLED screen. So I moved up and thought about the iPhone 11 for $699. not exactly throw away money, but still very doable. I could make that purchase with my previous savings and not even worry about all the stimulus money. But when I read up on it, that phone is beloved except for it's battery. Yeah, I'm going after a battery problem, so it's best not to even consider a phone where the battery is its weakest link. That moves up to the iPhone 11 Pro... but now we're talking real money. $1000, or $1150 in the memory I'd want. But that's smaller again than my Pixel and if I'm spending real money, I'd better get more of what I want.
So yeah, after getting the phone, getting the 2 year extra warranty, a few cables for the car and charging (damned lightning connector!), and a clear otterbox case, my new iPhone 11 Pro Max in Midnight Green with 256 gigs of storage cost me about $1600.
Before I get to the problem switching phones got me into, let me tell you that the iPhone is great. I've only been using it for all of four days at this point, but it seems to click off every mark. I've used iOS before and have had my iPad Pro for 14 months now so getting my head around the operating system isn't all that bad. First the bad:
- I still don't like the grid layout of icons.
- I still don't like the lack of widgets
- I don't like ALL the programs being out on the screen all the time
- I don't like the alarm
The alarm needs a little explanation. I have two alarms every day. They're used to remind me to take my pills in the morning and the evening. The morning alarm also serves as a last ditch reminder of "it's time to go to work". These alarms go off every single day with extra afternoon alarms on the weekends when I'm not at work (yup, I take pills then too). My alarm most mornings is at 10:10 but I'm normally ready to go to work by 10:00. With the pixel (and I believe most or all androids) I pick up my phone, pull down the notification screen where it shows my upcoming alarm, and I can dismiss it then and there. I won't need it and it's annoying if I forget to dismiss it and it goes off while driving. The iPhone doesn't seem to have a feature that allows me to dismiss an alarm before it goes off, which leaves me the options of either turning the alarm truly off and hoping I remember to turn it back on later, or to just let it go off at 10:10 and then turn it off manualy. Ick.
The battery life hasn't gotten a real chance to stretch as I plug it into the car on my daily commutes, so it's charged up to 100% when I get home at 9 PM and more than 95% when I leave to work the next morning. But yesterday, Saturday, I started the day with it at 95%. I used it pretty heavily including a 3 hour stretch of screen on time while I played a trivia game with my brother. Normally a day like that with the Pixel would leave it at about 20%. The iPhone was at 56% I went for a short drive for breakfast this morning (delivering McDonalds to Mom and picking up Wendy's for my brother and I), so the phone is already charged back up to 77% and will easily get thorugh today. I'd have bet on it getting through today with only the 56%.
My biggest hatred of the Pixel was battery and that problem is solved. Now comes the near back breaking problem.
As you know, I now exclusively use Google Play Music for my musical needs. I listen to it on my Windows desktop. I listen to it on my phone. I listen to it on my iPad. I listen to it on my smart speakers. And through the phone with Android Auto, I listen to it in my car. I can edit those playlists anywhere and the changes are seen everywhere. It's almost perfect. And since I used Google Play Music on the iPad I already knew it would work on the iPhone, and it does work beautifully there. Well, not beautifully as its interface is quite ugly, but yougettheidea.
Then I hooked up the iPhone to Nina. Instead of Android Auto I get Apple Car Play. They're basically the same thing. I had already downloaded Pocketcasts to get all my podcasts onto the phone and therefore the car and that worked well. But the Google Play Music interface didn't work at all in Car Play. NOT. AT. FUCKING. ALL!!
Seriously, it wouldn't even load any music. I could back out of the program so it wasn't locking up the Ford Sync system, It just wasn't working with Apple Car Play. I later learned that was a known bug. It wasn't my combination of phone/music/car, it was Google Play Music not working on Apple Car Play. And it's not like it was going to get fixed as Google Play Music is heading out. It's supposed to be replaced by YouTube Music like last year so there haven't been any updates in over two years.
I had always planned on moving to YouTube Music when they forced me to, but it wasn't ready for prime-time yet. First, it didn't let me upload my music. Most of my music is already in their collections, so it's not vital, but there ARE songs that I have that they don't offer and I want to keep those songs. Second, they didn't have a way to transition all my playlists over. I have the following playlists that I want to keep:
- Good Tunes
- This is a list of my best songs. It's a little less than 1000 songs and it's primarily what I listen to on the computer
- Drive
- This is a list of just under 400 songs that I maintain specifically for driving. When I play the 'Good Tunes' playlist in the car I tend to spend quite a bit of time skipping songs, so this just narrows it down. They're not all perfect, but I'll often only have to skip one or two songs before one I'm ready to listen to comes up.
- Shower Power
- 69 songs that I find perfectly energizing to listen to while I wake up in the shower
- Good Night
- 69 songs that I find perfectly calming to listen to while I drift off to sleep
- Best of Classical
- My 59 best classical pieces that are best when I need true background music, like when I'm working from home and don't want lyrics to catch me.
- Christmas Best, Christmas New, and Christmas All
- My Christmas albums. Best = my favorite 58 Christmas songs, New = new songs from that season, and All = All Christmas songs
There's another 4 or 5 playlists that I keep, but they can be tossed without much worry.
Re-creating Shower Power, Good Night, Best of Classical, and my Christmas playlists wouldn't be too bad. But Drive and Good Tunes would be lengthy. So until they made a tool to pull my playlists over automatically, I wasn't going to move.
But now the fucking phone is forcing my hand. This morning I figured I'd just make the switch as YouTube Music seems to work just fine on Car Play. I found a website that will transition the playlists over, but it does a pretty bad job. It mixed up songs, got the wrong versions, skipped some songs all together, and just made a mess of the smaller playlists. I figured it would work as a good start, however, for the two longer playlists. I'd transfer over the play lists, list the songs in alphabetical order, put Google Play Music on the Left and YouTube Music on the right and go through song by song. If the YouTube one was wrong, I'd replace it. If it missed one entirely, I'd add it. I figured those two playlists would take me the better part of the day.
But then the bigger stumbling block hit. YouTube Music on the web or it's Windows desktop app won't organize songs. I can't list them in alphabetical order. I'm not even sure what order their in as it kind of matches up with the Google Play Music playlist, but not well enough for me to trust it. So now, I can't even use that as a starting point. I'm going to have to manually rebuild those two playlists.
But that got me to thinking. Instead of working on a playlist like that and possibly find other parts of YouTube Music that doesn't work the way I want it to, why not look at all the alternatives. And yes, I've spun quite the tale to get here, but this is the gist of this post. You see, I want to think this through and figured this format of writing down my thoughts would be perfect. So you're getting these thoughts as they come out of my head.
First, there's the contenders:
- Google Play Music
- YouTube Music
- Apple Music
- Spotify
- Amazon Music Unlimited
- Tidal
- Pandora
Then there's the list of my needs:
- They need to play on all my devices
- iPhone
- Car Play
- Windows 10 desktop
- iPad
- Google Smart Speakers
- Android Phone (I might go back!)
- Android TV in general and NVIDIA Shield specifically
- It needs to have a wide selection of music.
- Google Play Music has about 40 million songs, so that should be the starting point
- It needs to be able to upload my rare music that they don't have
- It needs to be reasonably priced
That last one is the hardest one to define. Right now I pay $9.99 a month for Google Play Music. That already includes YouTube Music. BUT if I move to another service, I won't stop paying that as that's also my YouTube Premium service which takes out all YouTube ads and I LOVE that. So YouTube Music starts off as 'free'. Ideally the others would cost around $10 a month.
The second to last might be the hardest to replicate. I took a shallow look at several of these services before deciding to write this out and only a few had upload capabilities.
So.... Let's start off a list of the contenders with subheadings for the needs. I'm not going to include library size as I can't find official numbers or anything close.
Google Play MusicFreeDoesn't work on Car Play- no need to move past this
- YouTube Music
- Free
- Works on all devices
- Can upload music, but not easily
- Has a janky interface and can't pull playlists in easily
- Apple Music
- $9.99 a month,
- Works on everything except for smart speakers (can work through a device onto the speaker, but not natively)
- Looks like it works from iTunes (ick)
- Can upload music
- Spotify
- $9.99 a month
- Works on everything
- Can kind of upload songs
- Need to use the desktop 'local' files, then sync to mobile device using same wifi network. Need to try
- Amazon Music Unlimited
- $7.99 a month, $79.99 a year
- Also has HD version for $12.99 a month, $129.99 a year
- Like apple music, doesn't work on smart speakers (can cast from devices through Amazon app)
- Cannot upload music
- Tidal
- $9.99 for standard quality, $19.99 a month for lossless quality
- Like apple music, doesn't work on smart speakers (can cast from devices through Tidal app)
- Cannot upload music
- Pandora
- $9.99 a month
- Works on everything
- Cannot upload music
Okay, so before I made this list, I thought that playing music on the smart speakers was the thing I could sacrifice. I figured while I played music on the Google Home occasionally, it was something I could sacrifice. BUT, then I paused making this list and went to take a shower. Fuck. I listen to my Google Play Music every morning in the shower. I listen to my Google Play Music every evening as I go to sleep. That's VERY important, and now I can't sacrifice it if I'm going to fully replace Google Play Music.
If I HAVE to have play-ability on Android, iOS, Android TV, and Google Home, plus have to have the ability to upload my music, that above list looks like this:
- YouTube Music
- Free
- Works on all devices
- Can upload music, but not easily
- Has a janky interface and can't pull playlists in easily
- Spotify
- $9.99 a month
- Works on everything
- Can kind of upload songs
- Need to use the desktop 'local' files, then sync to mobile device using same wifi network. Need to try
And I started this by taking YouTube Music out of the equation. So Spotify? Let's consider how the 'kind up upload' will work. I find a song that I can't purchase and end up either downloading it or ripping it from YouTube. The computer would work fine as I can add it to my playlist, but to get it on the phone (and therefore into the car) I would have to get it into a playlist then while connected to the same wifi as the computer have the mobile device download the playlist. That's kind of okay... maybe? But downloaded songs wouldn't work on the smart speakers. At all. And if I synced my iPhone I'd get most of the way to having it everywhere, but what if I forgot to sync my iPad before a trip. No.... .this won't work. Certainly NOT as a replacement for Google Play Music.
That leaves me with compromise. I think I know myself well enough to accept that I don't accept compromise well. The limitations will work their way under my skin and just kill me over time. Now, that's not to say I don't accept working for what I want. Sure, Google Play Music is perfect except for the fact that it doesn't work. So I have to work at fixing it's limitation. I obviously can't fix the issue itself, so I need to work at getting my music to play in the car with the least amount of work.
What I'm picturing is Google Play Music being my default, play anywhere, do everything source of musical entertainment except for the car. For the car... which is VERY important as it's 2 hours of my time every single day... I'd have to use another service. This second service would have to be about as easy as possible. And that rub right there takes Spotify out of the running. I'd not only have to curate the playlists on two pieces of software, I'd have to manually add them to the phone. NOT acceptable. I still need to upload music that's not on the service though. So let's just look at that.
- YouTube Music
- Free
- Works on all devices
- Can upload music, but not easily
- Has a janky interface and can't pull playlists in easily
- Apple Music
- $9.99 a month,
- Works on everything except for smart speakers (can work through a device onto the speaker, but not natively)
- Looks like it works from iTunes (ick)
- Can upload music
Yeah. Remember WAY back when I was complaining of my iPod and iTunes experiences? It was one of the reasons I didn't want to be tied to Apple products anymore. I looked into uploading music to Apple Music, and it looks like it REQUIRES iTunes. I'd have to load that beast of a program onto my computer again. But the only alternative is YouTube Music. No one else lets me upload music in a seamless way.
Apple Music offers a three month trial. So I can try it for 90 days and see if it works. I think that's the next step. YouTube just isn't there. It looks like you can get your playlists from Google Play Music to Apple Music the same way I did to YouTube music, but I'm assuming Apple Music will allow me to organize the playlist in an order where I can compare versions of songs and get them set up right.
sigh
Ultimately, I'll be waiting for Google to get its act together and get YouTube Music working right. It's only been two years waiting for the transition, so hopefully this will be a short lived experiment with Apple Music.
I'll let you know how it goes.
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