Google Play Music was great. Apart from one missing feature about the inability to upload music from the phone to the Google Play Music library, I had no other complaints. Then it was forcefully shut down.
Google provided YouTube Music as an alternative. Unless you pay for the premium version, you can’t listen to the music offline, so, no music access while flying or traveling with no connectivity. Also, YouTube Music without Premium won’t play music with the phone screen turned off. I don’t mind paying. The problem is that it’s a subscription, so, you never know what the price will be a year or two from now.
This was a tipping point for me, I looked at quite a few alternatives. I couldn’t find a single alternative that can play music from cloud storage in offline mode without requiring me to buy a subscription. So, being an engineer, I ended up building one.
MusicSync is an Android app that plays music stored on your phone or on Google Drive. It has intelligent offline caching to ensure that data usage is minimized. MusicSync works in offline mode and with the screen turned off. MusicSync supports Android Auto as well as Chromecast. It is modeled after Google Play Music as much as possible. It has minimal display ads that can be removed with a limited one-time purchase of the ad-free version.
So, try it, and let me know if you like it.
Update [Sep 2023]: I heard the rumors earlier this year that Google Podcasts would shut down. And today Google Podcasts have been shut down. So, I started adding podcast support to MusicSync. Unlike music, people usually listen to podcast episodes only once. And they usually play it without downloading. Further, the user wants to change playback speed and skip silence. I’m happy to announce that MusicSync already supports that. You can either search for podcasts or copy/paste a web URL into MusicSync to subscribe to an RSS feed. By default, all newly published episodes will be added to “Queue”. You can enable/disable this for individual podcasts.
