Look. I'm not going to blame it all on Google shutting down Google Play Music, a lot of other things happened in 2020, but rounding out the year by losing that easy, streamlined access to my music collection (a messy, massive thing built over decades, starting with my very first CD ripper and Napster) did not help my mental health. And I've been struggling to find a replacement ever since.

Play Music was so simple: my entire music collection, with recently played or newly added items at the top, easy playlist creation, and a convenient "I dunno, just shuffle everything" button. And once that went away, it was weirdly difficult to find a drop-in replacement. WinAmp hasn't been good software in a decade or more, and just when I started to get MusicBee doing 90% of what I wanted it to (still couldn't play from my phone, but I was managing with streaming from my computer to my speakers) I switched to Linux and had to start all over again.

You think the Windows music player ecosystem is unfortunate? Jesus christ you should see what it looks like on Linux. I cannot find a single player that can handle a large library, playlists, and shuffle-all, and also looks like it was developed sometime in this millennium. I was settling for Clementine for a while; although old, it's pretty full-featured and it worked. I couldn't stream to my Google Home speakers, but I could have music while I worked, and that covered me 90% of the time. Sure, I had to switch back to my personal computer from my work computer just to pause or change tracks, but I managed.

At least, I thought I was managing. See, I couldn't find anything that worked comfortably from my phone, which is one of the reasons I even got a goddamn smartphone in the first place. Playing music on your phone is so seamless; it's just there. But I refuse to pay for a music streaming service to listen to music I already paid for, and besides, sometimes I like to be able to do things without needing internet access. So I just...didn't listen to music as often. Always in the car, unless I was listening to a podcast, but hardly at all just hanging around at home. And since I started working from home, that's basically all the time.

Well, it turns out the magic solution has existed all this time, it's just weirdly opaque and hidden behind the fact that technically it's designed for hardware that isn't being manufactured any more. Yes, it's the Logictech Media Server, an open-source continuation of Logitech's verison of Google Play Music (that, let's face it, Google probably ripped off in the first place) for their now-defunct Squeezebox smart speakers.

Now, the problem with this is similar to the problem I had trying to figure out mpd, which is apparently what everyone uses on Linux: it's a multi-part system, and as such the core piece works incredibly well and is very well supported but any given client is probably a one-person project and is liable to be dropped at any moment. Fortunately the LMS has its own client built in, in the form of a web player, and with a mobile-friendly skin it's perfectly useable on my phone.

...actually "perfectly useable" is damning with faint praise; I can see my playlist, I can browse my whole library, I can save and edit playlists, I can pull up the song that's currently playing and add it to a playlist, I can hit "shuffle all and don't stop until I turn it off," I can do everything I used to do on Google Play Music. And I can do it all with my own music collection, on my own computer, and the only internet connection I require is a functional router to connect to the local network. Add in the Chromecast bridge plugin and I can play it all on my Google Home speakers. I'm currently listening to "Beauty Mark" from Rufus Wainwright's self-titled album, an artist I'd forgotten existed but am delighted to be reminded of.

Plus, it all integrates with Home Assistant. I could start playing music to wake myself up in the morning again! I used to do this every day until Google Play Music broke and I couldn't figure out a replacement. God. The possibilities.

Being open source, there are a zillion plugins available; I can't wait to start playing with dynamic playlists so I can generate mood-based playlists again (wake-up music doesn't do me a lot of good if shuffle-all decides it's an Enya day). And this makes the prospect of replacing those Google Home speakers much more plausible; there's a Raspberry Pi solution that already exists, and you just plug it into any working speaker.

I'm still pissed as hell it took me three full years to find a replacement for something that was such a fundamental part of the scaffolding of my daily life (and mental health) but I am overjoyed that at least it's working now. And yes, I have learned my lesson about allowing proprietary tech to become such a key piece of my life. (Now it's all open-source and self-hosted stuff, so I have no one to blame but myself if it goes down...)