Getting Google Music Manager Working on Linux
Posted on 01/30/2019 in misc
My recent upgrade from Mint 17.3 to Mint 18.3 killed Google Music Manager. It seems to start up in that it shows as running in System Monitor, but there is no GUI. I tried un-installing and reinstalling and the same thing happened. I tried to downgrade to an older version but that resulted in unresolvable dependency issues. Google's suggestion is to use Chrome and upload through the browser. That would be fine, if it worked. But Chrome just hangs on 'Setting up Music Manager."
Why are so many of Google's services complete shit on Linux? Google has built one of the world's most valuable companies on open source software. The least they can do is dedicate an engineer to making sure their stuff is usable on Linux. There is still no official Google Drive client for Linux. But that is a rant for another day.
To get Music Manager syncing your music collection again, take the following steps.
- Un-install Music Manager
- Delete the home/[user]/.config/google-musicmanager directory
- Re-install
On the clean re-install it will start up like it has no idea who you are. Since my collection is 99.9% synced and I only buy about a dozen new records a year, I chose to not see what happens when it sees the same 550 albums on both sides of a new set up. I selected upload only and pointed it at the two folders representing the two recent purchases, and declined the option to monitor folders for changes. I'll manually run the app anytime I buy a new album. Music Manager is not my actual back up archive for music anyway. It is just for streaming music on my phone. I maintain a paid Google Drive account where I back up my music files.
I'm expecting Google to kill off the ability to sync personal music files pretty soon anyway. Amazon already killed it, and I'm not aware of anybody else that supports it. Eventually they will require us to buy a Google Music subscription to do this.
Update: Apparently something is screwed with the database files that get stored locally. I have to delete everything in the above directory to get Google Musicmanager to load. I use it 10-12 times a year, so I can do that. But still...