I have 10-15 GB of music from various sources: there are CDs that I bought, some that my late husband burned or purchased, and others that friends copied for me over the years.
I’ve ripped them to an external hard drive but have had a hard time listening to them in an easy way.
But!!! … Santa brought me a Google Home Hub and 2 Minis to go with it. Yay! I hoped this could un-stick my problem, but I can’t figure out the process.
Is there a simple way to use Google Home to stream all the various albums & tracks I’ve accumulated? I’ve seen the YouTube video that mentions uploading the songs to Google Music and creating custom playlists (to facilitate the speech recognition) but was hoping for a method that doesn’t require creating hundreds ( … thousands?) of custom playlists.
Just upload the tracks to Google Music. It automatically sorts them into the relevant albums, artists etc, and you don’t have to create custom playlists unless you really want to. After you’ve played a few tracks it’ll create playlists of similar tracks for you.
The easiest way - providing it’s not bootlegs and obscure artists - is just to use Spotify (you may need to pay $10 a month for an account). You can then ask Google to play ‘song x’ or ‘album y’ and it will do it for you.
Failing that, and as the Baron says, just upload the ripped music to Google Music and Google should organise everything neatly for you. Just be aware that Google is rumoured to be sidelining Play Music next year to focus on Youtube Red, so this might impact how this options works in the future.
If you can hook that hard drive up to something with Bluetooth, then this guide may be helpful.
If not, and you have a phone you can pair it with and an SD card slot, you could also maybe put the music the SD card. 15 GB is not all that much for an SD card.
Now if your music is on your phone, you can cast to the device. Put the music on the phone, and use a music player capable of casting. I know Rocket Player can do this. This assumes that you have an Android phone, I don’t know if iPhones can cast or not.
Also, a Chomecast Audio device may work for you if you have a stereo system you want to listen with that. Right now they are available online from Staples for $15. Nice little devices.