When Google Play Music was shutting down back last year (that business decision still makes absolutely no sense to me whatsoever), I and many others who were loyal to it scrambled to preserve our precious music collections and find other ways to play them. For me, that meant running my terrible HP laptop 24/7 for several days to download music on our terrible DSL connection, and to later offload them to an external storage device for temporary storage until I worked out another solution. (For the concerned, I've since upgraded to better speeds on gigabit fiber. I'll probably be writing a blog post about the rural internet crisis too at some point, so please look forward to it, or don't, I won't force you to.) I have a rather large music library (thousands of songs, in fact!) and I really didn't want to lose it because of a multi-billion-dollar corporation's awful business decisions.
For most, the solution is rather obvious: Store the music locally and use something like foobar2000 or MusicBee to organize it and play it back. The thing is, I'm frequently on the move, and I like to listen to my music from multiple devices, both of which make storing and playing it locally impossible and out of the question. Your next idea may be to spin up a Plex or Subsonic server, but this requires the host computer to be turned on all the time which is not only a power guzzler, it's also not feasible given the amount of power outages we experience at my home, and with dynamic IP addresses it can be a hassle to manage. What I needed was something hosted by someone else that would stay online most of the time and that I could easily access from anywhere.
Some time after I'd downloaded all of my music, I discovered the wonderful world of cloud music lockers. In short, a cloud music locker is a place to store and stream your own music. Think of it like a build-your-own-Spotify type of thing, where you get to curate your own personal library instead of having a library of millions of songs made for you already. It was exactly what I'd wanted, only missing the vast music shop of Google Play Music that I'd frequently patronized. The only issue was figuring out which one to use. I tried and tested many different solutions and in the end, I decided to upload my music to three of them, to avoid putting my eggs in one basket like I'd done with Google Play Music, so if one shut its doors I'd still have my collection elsewhere. I've decided to review and rate some of the solutions I've used, to hopefully help someone else decide on a music locker to use too in the event they're in a situation similar to mine.
Astiga
by Koenvh (acquired by elsten software limited)
Sadly, Astiga is no longer available for free. Its new owner, elsten software limited, has moved Astiga to a premium-only business model. I was worried that this would happen as soon as I'd heard Astiga was acquired, and as such, I cannot recommend it anymore if you cannot or do not wish to pay for a music locker service.
The following review no longer reflects my opinions of the Astiga service.
Astiga is my personal favorite out of all the services I've used and tested. It's not a traditional music locker, rather it connects to a cloud storage service of your choosing (think Google Drive, Dropbox, OneDrive, pCloud, etc.) which acts as the music locker, and Astiga acts as the player. It's an amazing concept and Astiga executes it beautifully, with many different ways to display and play back your music. It's also incredibly accessible, Astiga supports the Subsonic API which makes it possible to access it using any Subsonic player on any platform, like DSub for Android for example. Of course, there's also the official Astiga app for Android (which, upon closer inspection, seems to be a fork of DSub), but you're not forced to use it and you can even choose to write your own client if you wish. The web player also works on both desktop and mobile. All of this gives the user an incredible amount of choice and variety when it comes to how they play back their music, and it has to be one of my favorite features of Astiga.
The main service is absolutely free and allows you to sync as many songs as you wish, and link as many cloud storages as you need. The Premium subscription is optional but allows for faster syncing, automatic syncing, unlimited manual syncing, importing playlists from .m3u or .pls files, podcasts, automatic tag fixing, and support for more audio formats. The service is usable and quite enjoyable without subscribing to Premium, but if those features sound appealing to you (or you need them) and you like the base service already, I'd definitely recommend subscribing to the Premium tier. It costs €4/month, but if you don't like the subscription model or merely want to give it a try for a single month, you can opt for a one-time payment of €4 for 1 month, €12 for 4 months, or €24 for 12 months.
Astiga is my most favorite option out of all the services I've tested and, if you can afford or already have the cloud storage to use it (it supports free tiers of storage too), I absolutely recommend it. I sadly haven't been able to use it as much as I would like to since MEGA support was sunsetted, but I do have intention to purchase pCloud Lifetime to continue using Astiga. It has recently been acquired, so that may change your view of it, but I do have hope that the new developers will steer it in a good direction, and I do still recommend it.
Click here to go to Astiga.
iBroadcast
by iBroadcast Media LLC
(the thing that's censored is my personal email address)
iBroadcast is my second favorite out of all of the services I've tested, and is actually the music service I'm using to listen to music while I write this blog post. Some time ago, I wouldn't have recommended it at all due to the old and outdated-looking interface as well as the janky feel of the service, but the team behind it has been hard at work and has since completely revamped the interface for both the web player and the mobile apps. It's something I feel comfortable recommending now.
Unlike Astiga, your music is uploaded to and streamed from iBroadcast's own servers. To get your music onto iBroadcast, you can use the web uploader or the MediaSync Lite app, which is available for Windows, MacOS, Linux, and Android. The MediaSync Lite app works fast and works well, rarely ever missing a song. It can also detect duplicates and make sure they don't appear in your library. It's also possible to make your own uploader or use a third-party uploader if you choose to, giving the user choice in how they get their songs onto the service.
The Core service is completely free, and lets you upload as many songs as you like. The only caveat is that with the Core service, songs can only be streamed at 128kbps, which is subpar quality for many people. The Premium service fixes this though, and lets you stream your files at any quality, even the original quality. Premium hasn't officially launched yet and is currently in beta. When it launches, it will cost $3.99/month, but all Premium features can currently be accessed for free by signing up for the Premium beta. Once Premium officially launches, you'll be downgraded to Core and given the option to switch to a paid Premium subscription.
iBroadcast is one of the best music locker solutions in my opinion, and if Astiga is not an option for you or you don't like storing your music manually on cloud storage then syncing it to your player, then iBroadcast is the ideal solution. My only nitpick with it is that there's no Two-Factor Authentication support, but I've already submitted feedback regarding this, so hopefully that's added soon.
YouTube Music
by Google LLC
YouTube Music is... well, simply put, it's not the best when it comes to making your own library. It's the successor to Google Play Music, but it certainly doesn't live up to the expectations. The personal library feature is completely separate from the rest of your streaming library, and the uploader is slow and feels like an afterthought. All of this results in the music locker feature feeling tacked on, like it was added solely to appease the masses coming from Google Play Music (who, by the way, are still not appeased, so it evidently didn't work). There's also no music tag editing features whatsoever, as opposed to Astiga and iBroadcast, both of which have rather robust tag editors.
To get your music onto YouTube Music, you have only one choice: the web uploader. It only uploads one song at a time, and can take up lots of computer resources while it does its job, which is particularly problematic for low-end devices like cheap notebooks and Chromebooks. You have to select the music files to upload manually, which can be a tedious task if you have multiple albums to upload.
Playing back your music isn't any better. While the uploader supports a variety of formats, there's only one supported format for playback: 256kbps AAC. This is likely due to the fact that YouTube Music isn't even its own service - it's essentially just a fancy wrapper for YouTube itself. This means your uploaded songs are actually converted to private YouTube videos, then stored on YouTube's Music Library Uploads channel and displayed in your YouTube Music library. In my opinion, that seems a little deceptive, as YouTube Music is promising itself to be a dedicated streaming service while being nothing more than a fancy interface for YouTube itself, and ruining your music uploads and streaming experience in the process.
Getting your music
off the service to put up elsewhere is even more confusing. There's no in-app download option, but you can use
Google Takeout to download all of your music... with one major issue.
As Bliss notes on their Twitter page, Google Takeout doesn't download the unscathed MP3 files or whatever format you uploaded. Instead, the files are weirdly renamed to ".vid" files completely devoid of metadata, forcing you to fix the tags and rename the files yourself or else they're permanently unusable. It's needlessly confusing and is likely a result of YouTube Music being a fancy wrapper for YouTube.
YouTube Music is a commercial streaming service first and foremost, and all of these issues make it hard to justify the usage of it, both in a commercial context and in the storage and streaming of your own music collection. I'm mainly using it as a "last resort" of sorts, so that if all of my other options go down that I'll still have YouTube Music to fall back on. That's the only thing it's good for to me. If you opt for YouTube Music despite these setbacks, I recommend installing YouTube Vanced so you don't have to shell out for YouTube Premium to get background play and no ads with their pre-built streaming library.
Media Leap
by Media Leap Inc.
(the thing that's censored is my full name)
I'm not going to hold back. Media Leap is the worst music locker solution I've ever seen in my entire life, even worse than YouTube Music, and that's mainly due to the... well, everything about it. My primary issues with Media Leap are the interface and the uploader, though it does suffer from a myriad of other issues too, and I'm almost certain I won't be able to cover them all here. I actually got so frustrated with it that I stopped uploading my music after only a few albums and abandoned my account for good. I would've deleted it but Media Leap actually does not offer any option to delete your account. (This sounds like grounds for a GDPR lawsuit... if only I were in Europe.)
To get your music into Media Leap, you have two options: the web uploader and mobile app. The issue is that the web uploader is so much slower than YouTube Music's and frequently skips over files for no good reason, and suffers from the same "uploads only one song at a time" and "manual selection" issues as YouTube Music. This means that if you have lots of music to upload, you'll be clicking a lot and waiting for a long time. The only upside here is that you get 1 TB of free upload space, though with an uploader this abysmal it'll take you a long time to fill that terabyte.
You'll also have a hard time using Media Leap if you like your music in anything other than MP3, OGG, or FLAC, as those three options are literally the only formats Media Leap supports. Anything else and you're out of luck - Coming from iTunes? Your m4a files won't work here. You'll have to convert your file to one of the supported formats or just give up. The one silver lining here is that Media Leap streams your files in the original quality, but that won't be of much use to you if you can't upload your files in the first place.
The interface is also quite janky, with some animations feeling like an afterthought and switching from page to page throwing you into a completely black screen with a loading animation. The menus also feel very cluttered and disorganized, which can make it hard for some people to get around. There's a lot that could've been done better when it comes to designing the user interface.
And now we get to my primary issue with Media Leap...
The way your music is displayed. Who in their right mind thought it would be a good idea to display songs like this, as opposed to how literally every other media player displays them? You'd think the button in the upper-right would fix this, and it kind of does, but that display is absolutely horrendous too and I can't even begin to understand why Media Leap thought it would be a good idea to display your media like this. This makes YouTube Music look like a good option, even though Media Leap has the tag editing features YouTube Music lacks.
With all of these issues, I have no idea why anybody would opt for Media Leap. iBroadcast has the same feature set (a better feature set, even) and their client is more polished, plus their uploader isn't a piece of garbage. If you do still want to try out Media Leap, I won't stop you, but there is absolutely no way I can ever recommend it.
These are only a small handful of cloud music lockers that exist, but these are the only ones I tried out. The ones I absolutely do recommend are Astiga and iBroadcast. Use Astiga if you can afford or already have the cloud storage to link to it (or are fine with using a free tier), and if you don't want to keep up with your own cloud drive (or don't have one, or just want something easy and simple), then use iBroadcast. Don't even consider YouTube Music or Media Leap, both of them are awful in their own special ways and neither are fit for storing your music collection. If you know of a music locker that's better or worth mentioning, do let me know about it in the comments. I'm always open to trying out new services, and I'll review any suggestions here too!
Astiga
iBroadcast
YouTube Music
Media Leap
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