The Google Play Music app on the Mi Box is hot garbage.

by bhart81

Seriously, what a mess this thing is. Had some family over last night, wanted play some Christmas music. Fired up the app. As a subscriber I had a bunch of playlist recommendations show up. One was ”Christmas" the other was "Christmas Party”. Sweet, I thought, Christmas Party it is. I click on the icon, and nothing is there but a Christmas tree, no playlist selections, nothing. I try Christmas, same result. How can I play Christmas music I thought. so I went up to the search icon, clicked and typed "Christmas”. Boom there we go, a bunch of Christmas playlist. Music starts playing. After the first song I get an error saying it cant connect or something like that. At this point I want to chuck my TV out the window. It seemed to play the rest of the evening after that. The UI is clunky and counter intuitive, navigating your library is a disaster...Shall I go on?

Anyone else have this experience?

Sorry for typos, posting on my phone.

arrowrand

I don't use it a lot on Android TV because I have so many Google Cast Audio and Google Home devices in my house.

That said, it Google Play Music on Android TV gives me very little trouble.

prosonik

I've been a long time andriod TV user (Nexus, mi), and yes. It's a mess. It's been a mess for a long time. They never bothered to give it a facelift. Like others users, I use Chromecast audio instead. I hate that I'm still support google in that sense. What I really would like to see is the andriod TV become a hub for Chromecast audio and that I can control my entire house from my TV. I can do it from my Google home. I'd love to be able to do from both.

Tglover

I literally had the exact same problem with Google play on my Mi box. Only some stations load and play music, the Christmas ones just showed the tree blurred out.

haas599

Yes, it's pretty bad. Rebooting sometimes helps but the best thing is to just cast music from your phone unfortunately.

Nitronine

Haven't tried it on AndroidTV but I never have an issue with it on my phone or with Sonos.

cb9501

I have extensively tested mibox and nexus player with google play music, and the both suck in their own ways. I have a dream to have a "tv" device that I can use google music with so that I can program my control system and distributed audio system skip tracks, play, pause, etc. Seems simple, and I have that part working, but both devices stop playing on their own, so I've built a device to sense whether music is playing and issue a play command to resume automatically. but still the xaiomi restarts songs on it's own randomly so it will get stuck on a song often until you reboot last I tested it, and the nexus player reboots on it's own frequently, and at some point will turn off, and not turn itself back on until physically unplugging and replugging power.