Google says this whole transfer process will take place in steps, but the whole thing should take less than an hour. Of course, edge cases with massive music libraries or tons of uploads can take much longer, up to a few days. But even libraries with tens of thousands of songs shouldn’t take very long to port over. I was able to transfer my modest collection of about 8,500 songs, 131 saved stations and about 30 playlists in 15 minutes. In a demo with Google last week, a demo transfer of a account with more than 10,000 songs and many more playlists happened in just about the same amount of time.

As the transfer happens, you’ll find a banner on the YouTube Music homepage highlighting things it pulled over from the old service, and you can use the app while the transition is in progress. Google will send both an email and a push notification once everything is complete. Google Play Music will continue working for the time being, so if a user goes back to the old service for a while and wants to initiate a new transfer of their account, they can do it as many times as they want.

At the same time as Google launched this transition tool, it also confirmed that Play Music will shut down for good this year. We don’t know exactly when, but the writing is clearly on the wall at this point. At this point, though, most Play Music holdouts should feel pretty comfortable switching over, in my opinion — basically all the deal-breaking problems I originally encountered have been fixed. Navigating a music library is far better now, with basic things like sorting albums from A to Z (instead of by recent additions) is thankfully present now. Similarly, if you add a song or album to your library, the artists will show up under your artists list; you don’t have to “subscribe” separately to an artist channel.