pnathan on software

nothing in consumer electronics is so frustrating right now to me as the state of music playing.

• everything (ish) is streaming. But different means of getting audio to speakers exist.
• "Youtube Music" wants to autoplay your life out.
• "Google Play Music" was fine, but it was axed in favor of YT. And it removed "upload your music".
• Amazon music also whacked upload-your-music and went autoplay.
• Reliably instructing an Alexa device for words that aren't some deformed truncation of normal english goes like this, "hahahaha no".
• Google Home devices are better but I couldn't turn off autoplay, for even more fun

mp3 players are a defunct line of hardware now reserved for crappy crappy ipod knockoffs and some running devices.

None of the above needed to happen except, maybe, the hardware (due to profit/loss aspects).

Hosting my own music streaming service is doable, I guess, but then I lose access to the streaming libraries for which I (happily) pay for. And albums are expensive.

What's extra fantastic is that there doesn't seem to be a standard "wifi speaker" protocol, so I can't reliably send music from my android apps to Alexa or Google Home.

This is all bound in with what the choice was for the software to be written and the agency the individual programmers had at these different companies.

So it seems that the right way to do this is to buy a phone (because companies prefer to stream quality through apps, not browsers), hook it to wifi, and then have it wired into a speaker system. The phone would also have all my mp3s hosted on it.
Fantastically overcomplicated....