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There a few choices when it comes to cloud music services, the one I use is Google Play Music, the free service allows you to have 20,000 of your own tracks stored in their cloud service and if you subscribe to Google Play Music All Access you can download and play from a selection of thousands of tracks. It works great on an Android device and on the recently released iOS app but what about the device that is connected to my best speaker system in the house? My Xbox One is connected to my 5.1 receiver and has the best speakers so I wanted to get my music playing through the Xbox.

There should be two ways to do it, one is using the Android app that I used to get a Sonos linked up with Google Play Music and the other should be via the browser. Google has a browser based version of Google Music but unfortunately on the Xbox One it asked for Flash to be installed despite the browser based version working on other devices that don’t have Flash installed. Hopefully Google can get that sorted out.

I actually prefer using the Android app as it the best way to get complete control remote control over the playback. The app Cast To UPnP/DLNA from GMusic by Bubblesoft works by adding a Chromecast icon to the Google Music App which you can then stream any music from the Google Play Music app to a DLNA enabled device. Fortunately the Xbox One is DLNA compliant via the Xbox Music app.

So once you have installed the app on the an Android device you see the Chromecast icon and you can pick the Xbox One as a target. When you play a track the Xbox displays the track name and artist but sometimes it shows the album art (I haven’t worked out why it doesn’t work every time). I found if you start skipping tracks on the Android app it takes a few seconds to catch up on the Xbox One but overall it works very well.

The app itself is free but it limits you to 20 minutes of audio playback, £1.69 gets you the full version. Get the app from the Google Play Store.
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