Youtube Music is nothing compared to Google Play Music.

The transfer is complete, my music collection that I have enjoyed listening through Google Play Music for the best part of a decade has now moved to the new improved cash machine that is Youtube music. 

The end of an era, the end of listening to albums cast to my hifi at 320kbps. 

So what is my problem with Youtube Music?

Let's start with the least infuriating feature. Finding an individual album (that I own and have uploaded) is now incredibly difficult. Albums and Artists are listed on separate tabs. Tap either, through the web or the app, and you're presented with the YouTube Music Artists you have bought, which is none, so I have to manually switch it to uploaded. If I'm looking at Albums, they're not listed in artist order, but album title. With 10,000 songs, that's a lot of albums to scroll through and loading time isn't great, so getting to 'The Seldom Seen Kid" or anything lower down in the alphabet takes forever. But there is an easier way, being Google, of course, I can search! So if I type "The Seldom Seen Kid" it pops up. If I tap play in the web player. It creates a mix of Elbow songs and videos and plays adverts as well. I can no longer listen to my own albums, in the order they were meant unless I scroll down to it, which because of the loading times, is just horrible. If I search for an album on the app and press play, I get adverts and then the music videos where they exist. I JUST WANT TO LISTEN TO MY MUSIC!

As mentioned, this is the least infuriating aspect. 

So on to music quality, A large proportion of the music I have downloaded is in 320kbps. Honestly, played back on a relatively good hifi, this is the only way to enjoy the MP3 format fully. Play Music supported 320kpbs and sounded excellent, you could tweak it so that you didn't have high quality if using your data over mobile, but I'd bought a package with a good allowance, which meant I could enable 320kbps over 4G, meaning high quality sound and full access to my music collection, anywhere.     

    But, not any more, 128kbps is the highest quality available to a non subscriber, so unless I'm prepared to fork out £120 per year, I have to suffer the lower sound quality. 

And finally, the old Play app that so many millions of us have been enjoying for so many years, used to cast to our GOOGLE chrome devices (see I'm making a point here that google sold us these audio devices to work with our music collections). Google devices that we bought in good faith, that streamed via optical toslink (a selling point of the Chromecast audio) at, you guessed it 320kbps. Now alas, that is no longer a feature for non subscribers either. You can stream via the web player, if you use Chrome, but trying to simply play an album from your own collection here is confounded by the shoddy interface mentioned in the second paragraph, although it is possible, although it'll only be at 128kbps, so won't sound as good as when you uploaded it. Which sucks. 

(EDIT: Update - having finally twisted YouTube Music to cast an album I own, in order (even at 128kbps) over our home network, on 5Ghz, it is choppy. Might go back to CDs)

Overall, it's a woefully poor shadow of what Google Play Music was, and I shall be treating myself to either an iPhone next time I upgrade, or I'll simply get a huge memory card and try and find an audio player that will cast from my phone. 

Very poor Google, you've disappointed a large amount of music lovers all around the world and rendered our Chromecast Audio devices useless. Seriously, what am I supposed to do with it now?