I'm the author of the unofficial client library OP referenced. It's great to see folks building such awesome things on it =)

Shameless plug: gmusicapi has plenty of contributor-friendly work for all skill levels. If you're interested, shoot me an email or feel free to dive right into some issues.

https://github.com/simon-weber/Unofficial-Google-Music-API

Great post. I may check this out, although I usually need more flexibility than just playing radio.

It is pretty sad to me that in 2014, my Sandy Bridge Core i7 machine with 16GB RAM occasionally stutters while playing Google Music in Chrome.

Thanks! I'm not much of a writer but I figured someone else might be looking for this, so I might as well put it out there. And you can do more than just radio, pretty much anything you can do on the web interface, you can do with GMusicProxy, short of uploading files.

I don't think streaming can beat having the actual files on disk (and owning them). Specially if you like listening to high quality flac instead of lossy compressed music.

That would give me pause considering I run it without issue on a much slower Mac and have in fact run it on 5-year-old PCs without that issue.

When you're pushing triple digits of open tabs, it can definitely become an issue. Plus the web interface runs on flash and support isn't great for Linux, even chrome's Pepper version has a ton of issues.

edit: Point being that playing an mp3 should never freeze any system built in this millennium, and yet it does. So this is a bit of a workaround to avoid that. Plus with this setup you can enable global media keys/hotkeys and get a lot more control over playing your music.

I'm certainly not saying what they have is ideal, so don't take offense on that note. I welcome a native-ish client ala Spotify since I foolishly subscribe to both.

But as someone who keeps their open tabs in the double digits (although pushing it sometimes), I've not encountered much playback issue.

I haven't run into any issues on my i5 machine, but on a core2duo machine it was many many times a day I had to kill firefox/plugin-container just in time or I'd have to reboot.

To be honest I've only run it in Chrome and it's been pretty happy there on Ubuntu, Windows or OSX.

Triple digits of tabs? You're the guy with more icons on his desktop than can fit, right?

Heh, I actually don't have any icons at all, I just like having everything I need out in front of me so I use awesome window manager and open a bunch of windows with tons of tabs, multitasking at its finest.

pretty sure the hardware isn't the problem then! could be your internet connection?

If you were to go down the mopidy route instead, you could use the mopidy-gmusic extension and not bother with GMusic Proxy or those extra scripts. http://docs.mopidy.com/en/develop/ext/external/#mopidy-gmusi...

Could you? It seems to me that mopidy-gmusic does not have All Access support. That's according to this issue: https://github.com/hechtus/mopidy-gmusic/issues/5

It does have all access support now but I can't get it to work at all for me.

This looks brilliant, thank you for such a comprehensive guide. I look forward to trying this out tonight at home.

For anyone interested in this purely for the hotkeys/media keys functionality that a desktop client provides, you should check out this chrome extension - https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/swayfm-unified-mus... I've only tried it on my dell latitude with media keys, but it works great.

can someone explain to me how google can hold deduplicated files of copyrighted works and give access with only an assumption that the user uploading has the right to do so?

or is that just "not how it works"?

if it is how it works, what kind of questions can google be asked by copyright holders about those who are uploading?

their lobbying and legal department must be so far ahead of the content owners that it's not even funny.

I thought it was similar to iTunes "music match"? They pay a small amount of money to the copyright holders, who accept it on the premise that it's better to get some money for pirated music than none. Also it's a way to make former pirates "legitimate" without asking them to pay huge amounts of money for their collections. The copyright holders hope that they will stay straight after signing up.

After I uploaded my music collection to google music I've since bought 50 or so songs on the service. Before that I'd only purchased one CD from a local band in the last decade. So a good solid product at a reasonable price converted me.

Are you using all access? I don't buy most music now, since it's on GMAA.. makes me feel guilty, but also happy heh

I used All Access for a while but if I really wanted some music, I often went and bought it. That way, even though I don't subscribe anymore, I still have some of the music I really like.

Awesome! It would be great to see this on the AUR.