Google Music Sound Quality Issue (Resolved)
I have been a heavy user of Google Music ever since it came out. I have all of my music there, I purchase music from it (unless they don't have it then I usually go to Amazon then upload the mp3 to Google), and I have all of my rip CD collection there.
Over the last few days the sound quality has really suffered. I thought it must be my headphones so I switched them out. I tend to buy cheap headphones so I thought maybe all the ones I have had gone bad. Then I noticed I wasn't having the problem on my phone, just my computer through the web interface.
After poking around I found the streaming quality settings in the settings panel. It was set to Always High, meaning that even on a bad network connection it will still stream in high quality. I set it to low and then back to high and refreshed the page. The problem was gone! Apparently the setting was getting ignored until I changed it.
Sometimes in computer programs the configuration files can get out of sync with what the settings panel is showing. This is a bug in the code since the settings panel should be looking at the configuration files to display their values. That being said, usually the easy fix is to change the setting in question. This will cause the program to write the new setting to the configuration file, overwriting the incorrect value that was there. Then change the setting back to what you originally wanted it to be. Voila! Your settings are synced up again.
Just because there is an easy solution doesn't mean the bug shouldn't be fixed, but at least the user isn't stuck with it. Unfortunately since Google Music is getting replaced by YouTube Music I doubt someone will take the time to investigate why this was happening since a bug like this can be very hard to track down. I am just glad it is working again.
Over the last few days the sound quality has really suffered. I thought it must be my headphones so I switched them out. I tend to buy cheap headphones so I thought maybe all the ones I have had gone bad. Then I noticed I wasn't having the problem on my phone, just my computer through the web interface.
After poking around I found the streaming quality settings in the settings panel. It was set to Always High, meaning that even on a bad network connection it will still stream in high quality. I set it to low and then back to high and refreshed the page. The problem was gone! Apparently the setting was getting ignored until I changed it.
Sometimes in computer programs the configuration files can get out of sync with what the settings panel is showing. This is a bug in the code since the settings panel should be looking at the configuration files to display their values. That being said, usually the easy fix is to change the setting in question. This will cause the program to write the new setting to the configuration file, overwriting the incorrect value that was there. Then change the setting back to what you originally wanted it to be. Voila! Your settings are synced up again.
Just because there is an easy solution doesn't mean the bug shouldn't be fixed, but at least the user isn't stuck with it. Unfortunately since Google Music is getting replaced by YouTube Music I doubt someone will take the time to investigate why this was happening since a bug like this can be very hard to track down. I am just glad it is working again.
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