And FWIW, the migration doesn't work. The "thumbs up" playlist goes into YT Music "Liked music" which includes all sorts of other YouTube "music-ish" videos that we have liked over the years and the order is all jacked up, plus mixed with all that other stuff.
So your "Liked Music" is now, not what you intended. The migration was super botched by the product team because of this.
To every Google employee reading this: your company sucks. Tell that to your manager.
With the exception of Youtube, I will never use Google entertainment products again. No Stadia, no Google Play Movies. I don't know what their vision is for product, but whatever it is subtracts from the world. I was worried a decade ago when I saw music moving into the cloud. Now my fears are confirmed. Google never intended to be a good custodian.
Google shits whatever goodwill it establishes right down the toilet. They do it at every turn.
Before Google's music subscription product, I bought a lot of music on the service. And now they're deleting it all. All of my playlists and listening history is disappearing. That's not a good feeling.
Screw you, Google.
After the DOJ takes your illegal money printing machine away, you won't have customers left to go chasing after.
There’s a damn good chance that lots of people up the chain secretly think that too, but they don’t see any alternative to just putting one foot in front of the other.
I lived through OnLive -- from beta to shutdown -- and that is exactly why I'm putting zero money into these cloud-only game licenses, unless it's a Netflix-style subscription. When the time comes for shutdown, they won't do the courtesy of granting one free license for that game on another platform, e.g.: Steam, Xbox Live, PSN. The purchases will just be gone and people will point at the ToS.
The only way IMO is GeForce Now-style services, where your existing digital library is honored. That or Netflix-style subscriptions like Game Pass Ultimate.
I realize we're talking about music and google here, but i'm curious how people feel about Audible and Kindle? I made a fairly large bet on Audble+Kindle because we ran out of space in our home for books (as well as the portability.) Our entire library is now on Kindle with elaborate notes -- how big a risk do you think this is?
(to compare risks, btw, in the past my past home got majorly flooded (Hurricane Sandy) and we also lost all our books+music cassettes in 1992 during the Nor'Easter...so it isnt like any option is w/o risks though of course there are levels of risk and levels of damage)
At least with Kindle books, you can run them through DeDRM and back up the DRM-free files. With Audible audiobooks, I’m not aware of a method other than to play them back and record the audio in real time.
OpenAudible works to remove the DRM on Audible books. Worst case, grab the CD versions from your library and rip them yourself.
It’s a shame about the notes on Kindle, I don’t think those are something you can back up / transfer. Really makes me wish that the open source alternatives had the same level of polish and feature set.
Good point, though with the YouTube-dl DMCA takedown recently (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24872911), I wouldnt be surprised if DeDRM type utilities also get taken down soon.
Kindle and even PC downloadable games fall into the same category. You stand to lose your license to access if the service shuts down but at least you have binaries or files that could be reversed. It’s becoming harder though, considering how much effort RDR2 took to crack.
I (mostly) only buy DRM free books,and I'm happily reading them on my ancient Sony reader which has neither a touchscreen nor wifi. Baen has a fantastic collection of DRM free content you can buy directly from them. All the Tor books are available from your favorite bookseller without DRM.
I use a Kindle, but always buy books from sources that also offer epub and PDF in addition to Kindle formats, unless the only digital alternative is on Amazon as some editors are very keen on Kindle DRM.
For my eyes e-ink devices are the best to read on, just like paper.
The thing is: this isn’t even a fringe viewpoint. It’s pretty obvious that people are avoiding it at least in part because it’s from Google, and Google are never in it for the long haul.
They’re already getting proved right, as well, Stadia’s getting barely any updates or new games, no exclusives worth the candle. It’s really just a matter of time.
I am for now. There was the upfront controller investment as I already had the Chromecasts. For the most part I just play the free games on offer because of the fear of throwing money down a hole.
"I don't know what their vision is for product" Unless it pipes ads at you, after collecting as much telemetry as possible, they don't have one either.
Ok then that's much better than I expected it to be. Other services that act primarily as digital shops get a lot of praise overall( qobuz bandcamp) so I'm not sure about the situation here.
> I honestly don't know why Google's Product Team has any positive reputation at this point.
They have a positive reputation?
I've been a loyal Googler for about 20 years. Nexus, Pixel, Chromecasts, GMail, Fi, Android TV, Google Domains...
I'm about done. It seems like every month they do something to make it more apparent that they're just an advertising company. Products fail to get maintained, they get upgrades that make them less useful, or they're outright cancelled.
I'm planning on de-Googling a bit soon. I may stick with Android, although iPhones or FOSS options are tempting. I feel like I can't stomach supporting Google when they continue to make misstep after misstep.
> I've been a loyal Googler for about 20 years. Nexus, Pixel, Chromecasts, GMail, Fi, Android TV, Google Domains...
It was the same for me. But when Google seriously started botching the Nexus line and I bought three almost unusable products in a row (Nexus 9, Nexus Player, Nexus 5X), I was fed up and left.
Photos continues changing interface every few months, every time without any clear reason or logic. The underlying product is solid, but photos(and other Google products) definitely feel like they have some very expensive designers who continuously have to justify their own existence by changing the interface over and over and over again, without any reason to keep changing it other than securing their own jobs.
The lock-in with Photos they've slowly moved in is phenomenal. The exporting of originals is always somehow difficult due to random bugs. Lately I've had to resort to Takeout with some relatives to migrate them to Dropbox where they're not locked in, and about 20% of the photos don't contain any exported metadata. It's ridiculous since Google Photos shows those same pictures clearly on the timeline, indicating it does know when they were take, it just excludes that information from the Takeout.
For me it seems more or less (mostly less?) than iPhoto though I'm not really an iPhoto user.
What I find frustrating is I'd like to name people (as in face recognition) but the UI for doing so is horrible. Instead of being optimized to let me tag 50 to 100 people it's design to do one person at a time in a tedious way where you pick one face from the list of faces which takes to another screen where you edit the name, then going to back to the list you've lost your place.
Further, there is no way to sort or set a priority on people so for example 8 of the top 20 people it shows are people I haven't interacted with in 10 to 15 years. I'd much rather it show people who are part of my life. Further, one of those 8 is an x. I have no ill will toward them but I don't really want them at the top of the list. And, there's no rhyme or reason who's on that top list. it's not a list by number of photos or most recent or anything that I can figure out.
Why is this important? Because if I can tag my photos I can search for photos of people. But since they make it hard to use it's like they don't want it to be used.
not OP, but for me the killer feature of photos is having a phone gallery that syncs with the cloud and is easy to browse in my phone and my pc. My phone breaking or being lost is way less of a worry now since I don't have to worry about backups, and I can take a picture and have it available in my pc instantly.
iPhoto is mostly the same but it's too tied to the os, which is a problem if I want to move to android for a while or need a photo in my work laptop that isn't tied to my apple account.
I'm having a very hard time deciding what my next phone will be. I'd like to move away from Android because it's basically an advertising machine, and iOS certainly seems to be the more privacy focused... But I also won't be able to run "real" firefox with an ad blocker like I can on Android...
Use PiHole on a Raspberry Pi or set your DNS to use servers that block ads via DNS.
I did the latter six months ago. One time I've had to show my college freshman how to change the DNS on her MacBook from the router default settings to Google or Cloudflare because the software her class was using wouldn't work otherwise.
We do have a Roku and I get tempted to set up 2 Raspberry Pis for PiHole. I did set up one, then had some issues because the router wants 2 DNS hosts. But it looks like a lot of time and switching DNS was so easy.
I have PiHole set up, and it's great. I do need to figure out a way to VPN to my pihole while I'm out and about.
I also am using cloudflared so my upstream provider is CIRA's excellent Canadian Shield DNS provider and all the clients in the house end up going over DNS-over-HTTPS.
If you upgrade your router to something like FreshTomato or DD-WRT, you have a lot more control over what DNS servers you advertise to clients on the network.
I'm in a similar boat. I'm not planning on getting the new Pixel though (the Pixel 5 is badly conceived), and too many bad experiences with Samsung mean I'm considering moving to iPhone.
Even if Google kills the Domains product, migrating to a different domain registrar is easy, and even Google wouldn’t kill the service off without offering a long time to migrate.
Regardless of price, I would never tie my domains to any Google account that has anything else in it. If it ever gets suspended by a rogue algorithm you might've just lost your domains unless you backed up your transfer keys and took a bunch of other precautions.
GPM was my first streaming music service. I subscribed when it was still $7.99. It didn’t get too many updates, but it worked fine for years. Then they started pushing me to YT Music, which IMO is garbage.
I’m happy I realized where they were headed and switched to Apple Music awhile back.
Google Colab has a very very strong Engineering team. Part of Google Research they definetly changed the game when they offer a free product which 1) increased collaboration across ML research 2) offer everybody access to GPUs first K80 and now T4 which is great among researchers and students. Now many other notebooks products now want to be the Enterprise colab version
Very good question. They target different audience,
Google has many notebooks solutions: colab (free) colab enterprise (monthly) kaggle, ai platform notebooks and datalab. Colab is targeted to students/researchers which are just experimenting, as there is no guarantee that kernel will run more than 24hrs. The paid version removes this restriction. AI notebooks is targeted for enterprise data scientists (Jupyterlab) which require patches/VPC-SC/IAM integration, security, etc. Datalab is the very first version of the notebooks and that's going away. Kaggle is mainly for competitions. In the end Google will have only 2 Notebooks colab and AIP notebooks
I dunno, I believe Microsoft's Azure Notebooks predates Colab and perhaps gave Google the kick to make it public, and Colab was a spinout of an internal tool with a rather rocky relationship with open source that has still been a pain point I run into using it for teaching ("what is the difference between Colab and Jupyter?" is a question without an especially clear answer). Also they stole the name from GE's old internal social network.
That latter one, at least, was not entirely serious criticism.
I'm not sure that even Colab is an unmitigated win for the company, it does definitely have "that AWS feeling" of an internal tool that was made a product without really retooling it for that purpose thoroughly. This has kind of become the norm in cloud platforms, though.
I had the same error with contacts on Google Contacts disappearing repeatedly when I changed phones and tried to re-sync. Contact information is so important in business that once you lose it you dump the product forever. Google Contacts immediately stopped being my Master Copy, though I use it as a convenience.
I really wish I could set my own permissions, it seemed like it had some multi-master bug.
I have videos of recipes and comic shows in my Liked Music. You would think youtube Google had better AI to detect this kind of stuff. Makes think many of the videos being wrongly censored/demonetized on youtube may really be because of faulty AI detection of the content. I do enjoy the fact that I can get all those live video music available on Youtube and not on any other platform.
Yes, good point. But I don't see mixing recipes video in your music as something optimized for revenue as I don't see any ads but maybe it pumps the views of these recipes or something.
I'm curious to know what you think should happen to those. They are songs after all, and some people liked them because they actually do like them as songs, so how would Google determine what reason you liked them for?
Are you suggesting Google shouldn't bring likes for certain songs over to YT music because you liked them 'as memes' rather than as music?
Just let the Google Music import create a separate playlist called "Google Music Favourites". that took me 2 seconds of thinking, surely the overpaid 'talent' at Google can come up with a better idea that their current 'fix'?
I don't want the option to completely separate my YTM likes from Youtube likes. I would much rather have to re-like a song again on YTM than have random videos show up on YTM. I don't want any of my Youtube content to be transfered.
If you think of it, before when I was on GPM, I didn't have any of my Youtube content and I was perfectly fine. So I'm not sure why I need any of it now.
So your "Liked Music" is now, not what you intended. The migration was super botched by the product team because of this.