When I’m away from home, I still want to listen to the music we have at home (well, I can live without the LPs). We had well over a thousand CDs so that’s a lot of music, 12,286 tracks ripped into Apple Lossless. Except for a few MP3s from, well, never mind. This instalment of the De-Google Project is about ways to do that with less Big-Tech involvement.

The former Google Play Music, now YouTube Music, allowed you to load your tunes into the cloud and play them back wherever your phone or computer happened to be. Except for it used to be easy to upload — just point the uploader at your iTunes library — and now it’s hard, and then Google removed YouTube Music’s shuffle-your-uploads feature from Android Auto. Also they fired a bunch of YouTube Music contractors who were trying to unionize. So screw ’em.

I discovered three plausible ways to do this. First and most simply, dump the tunes onto a USB drive; wherever you are in the world, you can usually plug one in and play tunes from it.

Second, there’s Plex; you run a Plex server on one of your computers at home (in our case a recent Mac Mini) which you point at music and video directories, and it’ll serve them to clients on the Web or on phones or on platforms like WebOS and Roku.

Also, it’ll serve your media to anywhere in the world, using UPnP to drill an outgoing hole through your firewall. Obviously, this could make a security-sensitive person nervous and does bother me a bit, because UPnP’s history has featured some nasty vulnerabilities. I have a to-do to check whether the version on my dumbass telco ISP router is reasonably safe. I believe that Tailscale would offer a better security posture, but don’t want one more thing to manage.

Finally, Apple Music can apparently do what YouTube Music does; let you upload your tunes into the cloud and play them anywhere. But moving from one Big-Tech provider to another doesn’t feel like progress.

Does it work? · Setting it up on Plex was a Just-Works experience. The process even reached out through our modern Eero mesh to the old telco router and convinced it to set up the appropriate UPnP voodoo. If you open the Plex server admin interface it occasionally complains about a double-NAT situation but works anyhow.

Getting the USB working was kind of hilarious. First of all, I bought a 512G USB stick. (My Mac says it only has 460GB, but what’s 50G between friends?) USB-A because that’s what the car has. It took a couple of hours to copy all the music onto it.

Then I plugged the USB stick into the car and it showed up instantly in the “Sources” tab of the media player, but greyed out. I snickered when I noticed that all the car infotainment menus were crawling and stuttering. Asking the car’s mighty electronic brain to index that mountain of music was making it sweat. Anyhow, after a few minutes, I could access the USB and now it works fine, mostly.

By “mostly”, I mean that when I tell it to play music off the USB, it takes a few seconds for the music to start, then a minute or more to get its shit together and present a coherent picture of what it’s playing. And on one occasion, the music player just randomly switched over to the radio. So I suspect my inventory is pushing the poor little toy computer in the car pretty hard. But once it’s going, the presentation is nice:

A few items to note here:

1. “Musick” is the name I gave the USB key.

2. That recording is Jesus’ Blood Never Failed Me Yet, a truly unique piece of work by British composer Gavin Bryars. Opinions vary; I think it’s magical but it’s one of the few pieces of music that I am absolutely forbidden to play anywhere my wife can hear it.

3. The car software is way more flexible than Android Auto; this is just one of the car’s three screens and there are a lot of options for distributing your music and weather and maps and climate control across them.

Which is better? · It’s complicated. Obviously, the USB option doesn’t require any network bandwidth. And I think the album-art presentation is nicer than Plex’s. (You can see that here).

The audio quality is pretty well a wash. Plex is a little louder, I suspect them of Loudness-War tactics, which is probably OK in a car with its inevitable background noise. Plex also crossfades the song transitions, clever and pleasing but really not essential.

Plex is really nice software and I feel a little guilty that I’m not sending them any money. They do have a “Pro” level of service; must check it out.

Then of course Plex needs Android Auto. Which on the one hand I’m probably going to be running a lot if I’m driving around town to appointments. But… Android Auto is already a little shaky some days, not sure whether it’s crashing or the car software is creaking or it’s just yet another lousy USB-C connection (I am developing a real hate for that form factor).

Realistically, given that our car (a Jaguar I-Pace EV) wasn’t a big seller and is five years old, can I really count on Google and Jaguar to do what it takes to keep Android Auto running?

At this point I need to say a big “Thanks!” to everyone on Fedi/Mastodon who gave me good advice on how to approach this problem.

Anyhow, as of now, we have two alternatives that work well. The De-Googling march continues forward.