New Video – How To Play Free Music (With Zero Ads) On Your Google Mini

I have posted a new video on YouTube covering how to play free music (with zero ads) on a Google Mini/Google Nest Mini device, which is part of my ‘Does the Google Nest Mini Need a Subscription?‘ article:

Video Transcript

Hey YouTube, it’s Tristan from Smart Home Point here. I wanted to speak to you today about how you can play music on your Google Mini or Google Nest mini device if you’re not willing to pay for Spotify Premium and this is because a lot of the free music options contain a lot of adverts but obviously when you listen to music you don’t wanna be bombarded with ads.

Now as it happens there are four really awesome methods you can use to play free music on your google home device with no ads whatsoever. I want to cover these in this video.

Okay, so the first option is to play mp3s on your Google Mini or Google Nest Mini device. Now you might be wondering how you do this, because obviously you can’t store mp3 files directly on here. What you can do is sign up for free Google Play Music account and as part of that you can upload up to 50,000 mp3 files to your music library. You can then organize these MP3s into playlists, and you can play those playlists for free – with no adverts – on your Google Nest Mini device. Let’s have a look how you do this.

Okay, so the first thing you want to do is go to Google Play Music and you’ll be presented with the subscription plans, but the key thing to do here is just click no thanks, making sure you’re logged into the correct Google account that you want to use.

So we click no thanks and it says obviously with the free service you can upload to your iTunes, Windows Music or any other collections – which is really key here to this particular tip. So it says here that they need to take some payment details, but you won’t be charged for the standard service so I’ll just mute this video and go ahead and add these payment cards details.

Okay, that’s done I’ve added that and it just says payment successful but I haven’t made any payment in that you just linked it to a payment method. Obviously I’ve clicked the free plans so I won’t be charged anything. It will now load the music library which is obviously empty so we’ll come here top left it’s on the top left it will click the little menu bar there, you’ll go to upload music and you can drag and drop songs here or you can drag them from your computer now I’ve got probably around one and a half thousand mp3’s but they were all copyrighted music so what I’m gonna do is pick a free song which has – you know – relevant access right so that this video won’t get banned by YouTube basically!

So… thanks for that… right let’s download the music mp3 file. Okay, and then I will try to drop that up to the Google Play library. Click continue and I need to add (mumbles to self) Right what was I doing… okay, so I think now it’s actually added an app – that’s confusing. Let’s restarted and see the original website and try again. Right, upload music… upload… try again. This time it’s done something… yes so this time it’s actually uploading. Okay, so after waiting around a minute (which is a little bit slow) but after waiting a minute you’ve got this tab and it says one song added – which is great – and if you wanted you can play it here which I’ll quickly do.

There, now I previously mentioned that as part of this tip to playing free music on your Google Nest Mini you have to organize things into playlists it’s just a lil quirk of this particular tip, so the way we will do that is go to the song screen, click on the three dots, click “Add to playlist” – select a new playlist. Now, for the purposes of this test I’m gonna literally call the playlist “Skies and Shadows” and this is so they can say to Google “Play, you know, skies and shadows”. Obviously you can name the playlist what you want; you can name it by an album (mumbles) create playlist. Now this is all set up, the next thing we need to do is make sure that Google Music is set up that’s the supplier of music in our Home app so.

Okay, so on the Google Home app we will go to settings we will go to music and – once it loads – at the moment I’m linked to a Spotify a free account which obviously has loads of ads, but we will instead go to Google Play Music and it says it’s the default music provider and that will allow us to play the mp3s – or in this case the mp3 – that we have just uploaded. So let’s give that a try now. “Hey (blanked) play Skies and shadows” All right, playing the song Skies and Shadows from your Google Play Music Library.

Okay, the second method is to play music or audio on your mobile phone and then use the Google Home app to cast audio onto your Google Mini device. As long as you have access to ad free music on your mobile phone this is a really great method. Let’s have a look at how we do this. Okay, so using this method you’ll want to start playing music on your mobile phone. This could be through a podcast site or YouTube or SoundCloud (especially if you have an app that blocks ads) but in this case I’m going to carry on using Skies and Shadows from the Free Music Archive. So I’ll start doing is playing that song and now I will go to the Google Home app, click Music and click “Cast Audio”.

Okay, so the third method is to use your Google Mini device as a Bluetooth speaker. It’s very simple, very straightforward and nearly every laptop, tablet and mobile phone supports bluetooth nowadays; so you simply start playing music on your device, turn on Bluetooth and then you stream it to your Google Mini device. There are two ways you can turn your Google mini device into a Bluetooth speaker, let’s have a look at how you do that now.

Okay, so to get started with using your Google mini as a Bluetooth speaker, firstly go to the Google Home app. Make sure it’s, uhm, on – then select your Google Mini device in the top right you click the three buttons… no you don’t sorry, you click the cog and you go to settings, that connects to your device. Then what we’ll do is go down to paired Bluetooth devices. So you see here says that no Bluetooth devices have been set up, so we’ll say enable pairing mode… right, so now what we’ll do is go over to our laptop and continue the process over there.

Okay, so now I want to go to the device which I’ll be casting music from – in this case this computer I’m on – so what I will do is (mumbles) I’ll just close that. What I’ll do is click on the Windows key, search for “Bluetooth”, click this result. I want to make sure that bluetooth is turned on. I then want to click on “Add Bluetooth or other device”, click “Bluetooth”, and the living-room speaker is the name of my Google Mini device so I’ll select that. Okay, it says it’s ready to go. Sometimes it says this… click okay… what you might need to do is actually wait a few more seconds.

It’ll say paired and then click on connect. I don’t know why sometimes it does this, it just glitches a little bit. Okay, now finally it’s connected – as I said sometimes it can glitch up a little bit – the next thing to do is just go to the device you want to play music from and once you click play it’ll just play automatically to your Google Mini device.

Okay, the fourth method available to you is to use the Google Chrome web browser on a computer, start playing music on there, then click the cast button and cast music to your Google Mini device. As long as your computer and the Mini on the same home network this works perfectly well. It’s really easy to do and the benefit of this approach is that on a computer you’ll have access to literally thousands of different free music sources which don’t have any adverts whatsoever, so by clicking cast you’re then obviously casting completely free music to Google Mini which also doesn’t have any adverts.

Let’s have a look how we do this. Okay, so for the fourth method you can use the cast feature on the Google Chrome browser which you can see by clicking settings there’s a cast button. Now this is really useful because you can actually go to any website and as long as it plays music or audio you can cast that to your Google Mini device. In this case I’m going to use YouTube. Uhm, I’ve got an app blocker on there – simple chrome plug-in – and that means that I’m never actually gonna see any adverts.

So I’ll start playing a song and then what I’ll do is click on cast and you’ll see it appear in my Google Mini, play in there instead. Let’s start that now. Ok so go to the top right, and I can select the device – in this case my living room speaker is my Google Mini device. (Music plays). Okay, and when you want to finish, that at the top right it says it’s displayed on another screen, click that and it’ll stop playing on your Google Mini device.

This is the first video on the Smart Home Point YouTube channel but I’ll be producing a lot more so if you like this video please subscribe, don’t forget to hit the like button. Thank you!

About Tristan Perry

Tristan Perry is a software developer who is passionate about tech gadgets, DIY and housing. He has therefore loved seeing smart homes hit the mainstream. Tristan also has an academic background (in Math & Computer Science), and so he enjoys digging into the technical ways that smart home devices work.

Tristan owns close to a dozen Amazon Echo devices, way too many Philips Hue bulbs and lightstrips, a boat-load of Ring Cameras and Doorbells... and a bunch of other smart home devices too (from Reolink, Google Nest, GLEDOPTO and others).

If you have any questions, feedback or suggestions about this article, please leave a comment below. Please note that all comments go into a moderation queue (to prevent blog spam). Your comment will be manually reviewed and approved by Tristan in less than a week. Thanks!

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