I have had a Google Home with multiple Chromecast-enabled smart speakers throughout the house for a long time now. One of the devices in my setup was a classic Chromecast that was connected to my livingroom HiFi system, both for playing music, and for feeding video to my projector. This worked awesomely.
A while back, I had to replace the classic Chromecast, and begrudingly got a Chromecast for Google TV. I really have zero interest in the Google TV features and would have been happy to live out my live with basic Cast support. But alas, I bit the bullet, ground my teeth, and thought I'd get used to the overhead that the Google TV UI brings.
What I did not account for was how much the presence of this new device would degrade the overall Google Home experience (and, being a Chromecast, how crappy its Cast support actually is, and how bad the apps on the device are, but all that's another story for another day).
Here's my problem: Playing music. Plain and simple as it should be.
I am using Youtube Music as my music service of choice, and I have a Youtube Music Pro account (but no "regular" Youtube Pro).
* When I ask Google Assistant to "Play music on CC4GT" it will simply ignore the target, and play on the current device, even when the CC4GT is on and ready to play (targeting it for other commands works, though)
* When I ask "Play music on <speaker group>", where CC4GT is part of the speaker group, it will insist on playing using regular Youtube instead of Youtube Music (issues see below; playing on a group without the CC4GT works as expected, and correctly defaults to Youtube Music)
* The only way to get the **bleep** thing to play on Youtube Music, alone or as part of a speaker group, is to start playing on another device, and then transfer playback. Then it works fine (more or less).
When it insists on playing on Youtube instead of Youtube Music, it will a) not honor any of my listening preferences, usually veering of into generic pop charts after the first song, and b) not use my Youtube Music membership, instead bothering me with ads in between songs.
The same frequently happens when I start playback in the Youtube Music app (or rather Music section in the Youtube app, seeing as there is no real first-class Music app) on the GoogleTV - it will play a couple of songs regularly, and then go off to generic stuff and/or start playing ads, even though my account is present and active in the app, and showing my radios, listening history etc.
This is so annoying that I am already on the hunt for legacy Chromecasts on eBay to avoid this steaming pile of bad experience for as long as I possibly can.
