Google Play Music = one hot, honking mess?

[DesertTwang]

I never knew I would say this one day: iTunes is awesome. In actuality, iTunes drove me insane, and I was excited to move from an iPhone to my Google Pixel 2, but boy, do I wish I had iTunes back.

Google Play Music appears to be purposefully designed to be dysfunctional, to serve one objective: get people to pay for a subscription.

I'm not interested in streaming music over my phone - it would eat up my data plan in no time. All I want is use my Pixel phone like an iPod: play music that's physically stored on my phone.

But for some reason, even though I'm using Google's music uploader, which (supposedly) uploads my music files automatically from iTunes library into the cloud, I can't get this to work.

Google Play Music seems to upload random albums and songs, having numerous upload errors in the process and creating many truncated albums and orphaned songs in the process.

Most annoyingly, when I do get an album to play, I can never tell if the data are coming from my phone's memory or streaming from the cloud. Add to that that more often than not, the phone is playing music to my car stereo over Bluetooth, except there is no sound. As a result, I have gone back to listening to CDs in my car instead of using the phone. Which is ridiculous.

Does anyone have suggestions how to make Google Play Music into something that at least vaguely resembles a semi-functional music player?

 

[hallux]

I haven't had issues like you describe. I've used the music uploader to upload just as you have.

Most annoyingly, when I do get an album to play, I can never tell if the data are coming from my phone's memory or streaming from the cloud.

The way I can ensure this is to select "offline only" from the menu on the left. Only the tracks you've marked for download will be available in this mode once they have downloaded