I use my Shield TV a lot in the mornings to play music I have stored in my Google Play music locker (I don't subscribe). Thing is, I hate the UI.

I don't care for the voice search (I have dentures, which don't go in till after my coffee, so search mangles my results just like lacking teeth mangles my speech), so I have to scroll through a rather large list (been collecting CDs for nearly 30 years, ripped them all with a CD-ripping robot a few years ago, now have ~22,000 tracks to scroll through) if I want to listen to Slayer or (god forbid) ZZ Top.

Then when I do find the band I want and the album I want, and I start playing it, the screen goes almost-but-not-quite blank while it plays. Totally blank would make sense, to avoid screen burn-in, but this close-but-not-quite is annoying...who wants to look at a bunch of faded right-pointing triangles? Ideally I'd like to see some kind of onscreen track change notification...doesn't have to be permanent, just 15 seconds or so at each track change, telling me what track I'm listening to now. A visualization like WinAmp or iTunes would be nice, but probably too much to hope for.

Even worse is how it responds to buttons. If I do wanna find out what track I'm listening to, the intuitive thing is to press the main button on the remote. And that'll do it, but only by pausing the music completely, which is the last thing I want when I'm right into a wicked song and just want to know the title, to note for future reference. I can do this by pushing up or down, which will bring up the song UI and track list, but that's so completely unintuitive I'd have never guessed it. Finally, there's no stop button, just a pause, so when I'm done listening to music and want to use a different app, I have to kill GPM by double-tapping home and killing the app. At least I can do that now...before there was app-killing on Shield I either had to drill into settings and force-stop or else put up with the fact that sometimes whatever I was listening to last would start playing again, hours later when I was using a different app and the button I was pressing somehow made it's way back to GPM. Sucks when I'm listening to extreme death metal at low volume to wake up in the morning without waking my neighbours, then when I want to watch a movie at fairly high volume in the evening and the extreme death metal starts blaring out.

Anyways, enough of my ranting about the thousand little cuts the GPM UI is killing me with, is there an alternate client for Android TV?