Last week, Google delivered an ultimatum to folks who rely on Google Play Music to stream their own music collections. The service will stop working for all users in October, and in December their music uploads will no longer transfer to YouTube Music, which Google is pushing as a replacement.

I'm one of those affected users, having made the decision about five years ago to give up subscription-based streaming services and go back to buying my own music. Google Play Music made this approach extremely convenient, supporting up to 50,000 uploaded songs that you can stream on phones, computers, and other devices at no charge.

Unfortunately, YouTube Music is not a great alternative. You can't listen to uploaded songs on Chromecast devices or Google Home speakers without a $10 per month YouTube Music Premium subscription, and the whole interface skews toward algorithmic recommendations instead of picks from your own library. I'm not surprised Google botched the migration—there's little money to be made from folks who acquire their own music instead of leasing it via subscription—but I am disappointed.

As such, I've been steadily planning a migration of my own. Instead of relying on YouTube Music, I now access my music collection through Plex Media Server, a bit of software that essentially lets you host your own streaming service. You've probably heard me talk about Plex's over-the-air DVR features in my cord-cutting columns, but it's just as useful for storing and playing music you own.

I'm running the Plex server on my 2017 Nvidia Shield TV, with my music files stored on hard drive plugged into my Wi-Fi router's USB port, but you could also plug a hard drive directly into a Shield TV Pro or run Plex on a desktop PC or NAS box. Once the server part is set up, you can use Plex's player apps to stream the music on phones, tablets, and streaming TV devices. It even works with Chromecast and Google Home speakers.
 

Over at TechHive, I recently wrote a tutorial on Plex and other options for hosting your own music, but here I'd like to opine a bit on why it's even worth the trouble. What's the point of all this setup when millions of songs are just a subscription away on Spotify or Apple Music?

For one thing, it's nice to feel like you're not at the whim of ever-shifting algorithms. Streaming services are great for discovering new songs, but not as useful for accessing music you already enjoy. Plex is laser-focused on the latter, especially if you use the music-only Plexamp app on your phone or computer. Recent albums and playlists are prominently promoted, and there are several "radio" options that can mix up your library on the fly. It feels like it was made by music nerds, rather than just regular nerds.

I also appreciate being fully in control of audio quality. The vast majority of my collection consists of FLAC files, which are larger than MP3s but don't degrade the audio while compressing it to a smaller size. This is something I've built up over years by ripping CDs, downloading live concerts, or buying albums from FLAC-friendly digital stores such as Bandcamp, and Plex lets me access them at full quality. (It also lets you stream at lower bitrates over a cellular connection so you don't chew through your data plan.) Can my ears here the difference between a FLAC file and a high-bitrate MP3? Probably not, but part of me still just enjoys collecting and playing pristine audio files on principle.

And while building up a music collection does take work, in a sense the collection is its own reward. One of the reasons I stopped subscribing to streaming services is because they made music feel disposable to me. It was too easy to add an artist or album to my library and then move on with little more than a cursory listen. Now I get excited about finding, acquiring, and absorbing new tunes. (As an aside: I've found that just listening to my favorite artists' collaborators and labelmates is a better way to discover new music than any Spotify algorithm.)

On a related note, having your own collection means that music can come from unexpected places. The switch to Plex has also rekindled my interest in downloading free live concerts from sites like Archive.org, and I've been extracting audio from YouTube concerts as well. (YouTube-dlg or Clipgrab both work well for this.) Now I can listen to studio albums and live gems like this all in one place.

I'm not going to sugarcoat the fact that all this takes time and expense, especially if you don't already have a collection of tunes to build from or the requisite hardware to set up your own server. There's a reason Google is treating music uploads as an afterthought, and it's that hundreds of millions of people have voted in favor of accessing music by subscription.

But one thing that's held true for me over the past five years is that I like the inconvenience. Maybe it's because I grew up on cassettes and CDs, but the process of downloading and sorting MP3 or FLAC files makes the music feel tangible in a way I always missed with streaming services. That's especially true now that I'm hosting them myself instead of letting a tech giant do it for me. Maybe after reading all this, you'll find a reason to do the same.
 

Samsung's pile of gadgets: Samsung is updating its Galaxy Note phones with better cameras, bigger batteries, and increasingly-obligatory 5G support, but with no major advancements over the Galaxy S20 range from earlier this year. If anything, the $1000 Galaxy Note 20 is a step backwards, as it has a plastic back instead of glass, and it lacks the MicroSD card slot and ultra-smooth 120 Hz refresh display found in Samsung's earlier Galaxy S20 flagships. If you want the Note's built-in stylus without losing any bells and whistles, you'll need the Galaxy Note 20 Ultra, which costs a cool $1,400. (CNet has a useful comparison of the tech specs.) I still think Samsung is just pricing all its high-end phones under the assumption that they'll all be deeply discounted within a few months.
 

Other announcements from the broader Samsung universe:

• The Galaxy Buds Live are a pair of bean-shaped wireless earbuds that don't look or feel like anything on the market. I tried them out for a Fast Company story, and while they sound great and are pretty comfy, getting them to fit takes finagling, and the noise cancellation doesn't actually cancel much noise.
• The Galaxy Watch 3 brings back the rotating bezel, a feature on some earlier Samsung smartwatches that I loved for scrolling through menus. It's also loaded with fitness tracking features, though it's pricey at $399. It'll be tough sell against the Apple Watch for iPhone users, but a compelling high-end alternative for the Android crowd.
• The Galaxy Tab S7 and Tab S7+ are Samsung's latest answers to the iPad Pro, with 11-inch and 12.4-inch screens priced at $650 and $850, respectively. The 120 Hz display on the larger S7+ is especially mesmerizing, and it's nice to see an Android tablet swing for the fences hardware-wise, but Android overall has stagnated as an operating system for productivity. I wish this thing ran ChromeOS instead.
• The Galaxy Z Fold 2 is Samsung's second attempt at a phone that unfolds to reveal a larger tablet. It has a glass display instead of scratch-prone plastic, a sturdier hinge, and a larger outer display when the phone is folded up. It looks like a meaningful step toward making foldable phones mainstream, but Samsung named a price. The original Fold cost $1,980.

Apple's new iMac: In other hardware news, Apple has updated its 27-inch iMac, and it feels like a swan song for Intel-based Macs. Although prices start at $1,800, there's also a $2,700-and-up option with 10th-generation Core-i9 processor that Intel appears to have developed just for Apple. (Apple says it's 40% faster at transcoding 8K video files in Final Cut Pro X compared to the previous top-of-the-line iMac.) All configurations also include a 5K-resolution display, AMD's latest graphics cards, and an option for glare-reducing "nano-texture" glass (for an extra $500). You can even add your own third-party RAM upgrades for a lot less than what Apple charges.

Apple has said that it plans to stop using Intel processors in favor of its own silicon within about two years, so this may not be the last Intel-powered iMac we see before then. But once Apple starts putting its own processors inside MacBooks later this year, new Intel-powered machines will become a tougher sell. (My pal Michael Simon at Macworld still thinks buying one today is fine.)

Cash for Google+ users: If you recently received an email about a class action lawsuit related to Google+, it's legit. The company reached a settlement earlier this year over a software bug that let third-party developers harvest users' non-public profile data, so anyone who maintained a private or semi-private Google profile between 2011 and 2019 could be eligible for some of the cash. You can line up for your whopping $5 to $12 through the settlement website.
 

Thanks to KTLA's Rich DeMuro, I was recently reminded that you can prevent iOS apps from nagging you to rate them in the App Store. On your iPhone or iPad, just head to Settings > App Store, then toggle off "In-App Ratings & Reviews." (While you're there, I also suggest making sure the "Updates" toggle is turned on so your apps are automatically kept up to date.)

Sadly, Android has no equivalent setting, but that could change now that Google is giving developers a standardized way to bring up review prompts in their apps. A way to disable those prompts at the system level would be the next logical step.
 

New Google Home tricks: If you've got more than one Google Home speaker around the house, you can now broadcast a message to just one of them instead of all speakers simultaneously. Depending on the names you've given each speaker, you can say things like "Hey Google, broadcast to the office" or "Hey Google, broadcast to the bedroom."

For those of us who have young kids and are bracing for remote learning, Google's also set up a "Family Bell" feature that can make scheduled announcements on Google Home speakers throughout the day. You might, for instance, announce when school's about to start or when it's time to break for lunch. The easiest way to get started is to open Google Assistant on your phone and say "Create a Family Bell."
 

• Amazon's Alexa-powered glasses frames sound pretty bad.
• Google launches an Android-to-Android file sharing feature that you'll probably never use.
• Last year's Pixel 4 was not a popular phone, so Google's already stopped selling it.
• WhatsApp adds a search button for fact-checking your friends' conspiracy theories.
• Virginia is the first state to deploy the COVID-19 exposure alert system that Apple and Google built together.
• Why does Caps Lock exist? Benj Edwards has the history (and some modern use cases).

It's a good day to upgrade your wireless router with a couple of mesh Wi-Fi systems on sale.

At Target, you can get a Google Nest Wi-Fi router and access point for $200, down from the usual $270. The two pods work together to blanket a wider area in Wi-Fi—Google says it covers up to 3,800 square feet, which is probably optimistic—and they also both double as Google Home speakers.

Meanwhile, Woot is running a sale on refurbished Linksys Velop Wi-Fi systems. I suggest the tri-band system at $170 for a two-pack or $240 for a three-pack, down from the original prices of $350 or $400, respectively. My editor at TechHive, Mike Brown, reviewed these a few years ago and thought they were excellent.

Other notable deals this morning include Amazon's Fire HD 8 tablet for $60, the Fire HD 10 for $100, and Apple's official black leather iPhone 11 Pro case for $15.
 

I'll admit that this week's feature topic was a bit of a leap of faith, but it's one that I'm passionate about, and I love having this space where I can tackle such topics in earnest.

If you have any feedback or questions on setting up a music server—or if you have any sick early-90s live Phish FLACs that you'd like to share—just drop me an email or head over to Advisorator's Slack chat room.

Until next week,
Jared