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Currently downloading 71 GB of compressed takeout data from the retired #Google Play Music service and I have absolutely no idea what's inside.
@Hypolite Petovan I just choose to ignore this. If I had something in my account, I have no need of it. I just don't ant to use more google things than needed.
Well, Google Takeout usually is the last Google thing you use so I'm fine with it. I may end up scrapping the whole archive if it doesn't contain anything meaningful but for now I've very curious.
I need as much space to unpack the archive on my computer and, huh, I don't have it right now.
Music has a really intense bitrate. I remember I calculated that I listen to a minimum of 5GB of podcasts a month, and that's at less than a 1/4 of the bitrate of most music >.<
UPDATE! After uninstalling several video games, I finally freed enough space to unpack the first part of the two-file archive. Inside, I found 14,000 files, a mix of MP4 and CSV files. These look like the music files I had on my desktop more than 15 years ago and that I couldn't find again on my document drive that I have imported in every new computer since.

The remaining questions are: when and how did I upload all of these to Google Music that I don't remember having used at all? And what data the CSV files hold?
Perhaps I'm misunderstanding the remaining question, but did you ever use Google Music's "Music Manager" app that automatically uploaded your music library? That would be my first thought.
It's possible, but I don't have any recollection of it. For the longest of time I used Winamp and its awesome music library management features. I was copying music manually on my portable devices. Then I remember moving to Spotify fall 2013 and starting from the song Born Too Slow by The Crystal Method to constitute a favorite song collection that I downloaded on my smartphone to listen offline.

But Google Music? No memory of it. I'm happy to have found these files back even if I don't have any immediate use for them. I've been toying with the idea of setting up a personal media hub to have a good reason to buy music on Bandcamp but without my old files it was a little hopeless.

Does anyone have a suggestion for a self-hosted media library? I remember an open protocol for streaming music, but I've forgotten everything about what I looked into earlier.
Maybe I am not the correct person to be, but I use mpd on a server and MALP on Android, and mpc on my personal devices. I play it to shoutcast and listen to that.

I also have a plex server I use, but I hate plex with a firey passion.

Was the open protocol DNLA or mpd? Or something else I've not been able to find?!
I think I found Subsonic which seems to be based on DNLA. Or was it Funkwhale? I don't remember needing federation for what I wanted.
The one I've been using recently is a relatively new project called Navidrome. I really like it. It uses the Subsonic API, so it's compatible with Subsonic clients.
This entry was edited (3 years ago)
Thank you for the suggestion!
Oh shit! I think I missed Subsonic in my giant review of all of them - I need to install this ASAP!
Yeah, that was my thoughts exactly, it isn't even shocking if Google slurped those files in the background.

My last gripe is that all the files are in a single folder although they used to be neatly arranged by category, artist and albums on my computer.