[Q] Google Play Music seems to prefer cloud over local files - General Questions and Answers

Hey.
I've got some difficulties understanding Google Play Music's behavior on Android.
When i put an album onto my external SD-card, Google Play Music correctly finds it and marks it with a blue, vertical pin, stating that this album is stored locally. I can neither pin it, nor unpin it because its not managed by the cloud. Makes sense so far.
But when i upload this same album into the Google Music-Cloud with my PC (using the Google Music Manager), Google Play Music on my Android device detects this and suddenly turns the album to a grey, angled pin...
When i click this pin it starts downloading the whole album. But this doesn't make sense, since it is already available offline.
I would say the pin should simply stay blue and thus prevent unnecessary downloading.
Another interesting thing is, that if I play this album while the pin is grey and angled, it seems to play the locally available ones without caching anything (I monitored /data/data/com.google.android.music/files/music ).
Am i doing something wrong or is this the desired behavior?
I would be glad about some comments on this.

Related

mediascanner issue? my music is invisible

So I installed jelly bean when it came out. (Codename Android 3.6.0 at the time of writing, but the problem persists regardless of the specific rom I'm using). I noticed that none of the music players available in the play store can find my music on my sd card. They are all in a folder named mp3, but I even tried renaming it to music - no luck. Also, the only pictures I can see in my gallery are the ones that have been made since the installation of the current rom. Does anyone have an idea how to force the mediascanner to actually scan my media? Damn, I want my media so bad
lowert said:
So I installed jelly bean when it came out. (Codename Android 3.6.0 at the time of writing, but the problem persists regardless of the specific rom I'm using). I noticed that none of the music players available in the play store can find my music on my sd card. They are all in a folder named mp3, but I tried renaming it to music - no luck. Also, the only pictures I can see in my gallery are the ones that have been made since the installation of the current rom. Does anyone have an idea how to force the mediascanner to actually scan my media? Damn, I want my media so bad
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I have no idea why your music isn't being picked up. That's usually never an issue. Maybe someone else can chime in.
As for the gallery pictures not showing up. Just download Quick Pic from the Play Store. The default Android Gallery has been crying to be put of out of its misery for awhile now. It's terrible and slow. Yes, you can transfer pictures to your device and the gallery will take 5 minutes to eventually display them. Quick Pic is superior and will instantly pick up any pictures you add. No waiting involved.
styckx said:
I have no idea why your music isn't being picked up. That's usually never an issue. Maybe someone else can chime in.
As for the gallery pictures not showing up. Just download Quick Pic from the Play Store. The default Android Gallery has been crying to be put of out of its misery for awhile now. It's terrible and slow. Yes, you can transfer pictures to your device and the gallery will take 5 minutes to eventually display them. Quick Pic is superior and will instantly pick up any pictures you add. No waiting involved.
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Click to collapse
Thank you for the tip, QuickPic actually solved my gallery issue, what still remains is the music list not showing up in any of the players I have tried... (Winamp, Google Play Music, Apollo, just to name a few)
check if one of the apps in use is the media scanner in a constant state of reboot.
media scanner problems often are caused by malformed jpeg file, the bug usually lies in the Exif information, you can use this tool (http://www.digitalconfidence.com/BatchPurifier.html) to remove Exif information from the file, 95% chance that everything returns to work including music and video because the media scanner is shared and if it hangs on jpeg images then can not catalog other multimedia files.
you will lose data such GPS position but the photo itself will remain intact, many have pointed at Camera360 as one of the sources of these corrupted files and I can confirm that.
I got a similar issue before and is solved by copy all media to a pc, delete the files in the phone, then move them back, see if it can help you
Sent from my Nexus S using xda app-developers app
That's an old issue that happened to some when they updated to JB back in July. So, welcome to July.
lostman.it said:
check if one of the apps in use is the media scanner in a constant state of reboot.
media scanner problems often are caused by malformed jpeg file, the bug usually lies in the Exif information, you can use this tool (http://www.digitalconfidence.com/BatchPurifier.html) to remove Exif information from the file, 95% chance that everything returns to work including music and video because the media scanner is shared and if it hangs on jpeg images then can not catalog other multimedia files.
you will lose data such GPS position but the photo itself will remain intact, many have pointed at Camera360 as one of the sources of these corrupted files and I can confirm that.
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Click to collapse
Thank you for the suggestion, it helped me!
@madd0g you had better stay off the forums, you are completely useless...
If it's not fixed completely, run a search on your sdcard for files named ".nomedia" and delete them.
polobunny said:
If it's not fixed completely, run a search on your sdcard for files named ".nomedia" and delete them.
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Click to collapse
actually, I do use .nomedia files for... hiding my stuff you know
lowert said:
actually, I do use .nomedia files for... hiding my stuff you know
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Click to collapse
Alrighty. Just make sure there are none at the root of the SDcard or in folders where you want pictures to appear. Clockworkmod ROM Manager had a bug back a lil while ago where it put some .nomedia files in wrong folders, making people unable to find their music/picture.
polobunny said:
If it's not fixed completely, run a search on your sdcard for files named ".nomedia" and delete them.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
This tip helped me and my Note. Thanks a lot. There were a lot of useless .nomedia files in my SD card.
I already had similar question posted. Got no resolution....
http://forum.xda-developers.com/showthread.php?t=1882847
Anybody have the solution? I am able to see pictures in gallery and videos on my MX player but no music?
I deleted nomedia (found one) and got rid of rom manager but still my music files don't show up with all the players. I can go directly to media/music via root explorer and play it though.
Go to your apps, find Media Storage, and then clear data & cache.
Download Rescan Media from the play store and run it. Wait for a bit (5 minutes should be good) and if you check in your music player(s) you should be able to see your music.
database or cache that the media scan builds is gone
polobunny said:
Go to your apps, find Media Storage, and then clear data & cache.
Download Rescan Media from the play store and run it. Wait for a bit (5 minutes should be good) and if you check in your music player(s) you should be able to see your music.
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Click to collapse
I have done that and everything works fine. BUT! after a battery change or charge (plug in USB cable) the database or cache that the media scan builds is gone. Deleted or corrupted by something. Its back to the same state, no music, video, added ringtones or pics show until a rescan. What could be deleting it?

Google Play music behaving weirdly on Sensation

Hey,
I am having an odd kind of problem with Google play music (version 5.01) on HTC Sensation running Elegancia Rom V 7.0.2
Initially when i install google play music and set it up by selecting my google account, it reads all the songs on my sd card and I am able to listen to all sd card music without any problems....but then on its own, after some time, the google play music app stops recognizing my songs and instead i see this screen(attached image 1) when i open the app.
(What you should normally see on opening the app should be something like attached image 2)
I am able to remedy this problem by going to clearing data in the app settings then opening app again and selecting account again...but i have to do it once almost every day, so its a drag..
Has any one else had this issue?

Google Play Music: All Music Vs. On Device

I have a question for anyone using Google Play music. Has anyone else noticed that when playing music using All Music uses much more battery than just On Device even if ALL of your music is on your device. I've noticed that in my data usage screen Google Play Music stays as the highest consumer of data which makes no sense as all my music is locally stored. Chrome or Play Store should be the highest user of data. I am only playing music that is store on my SD card and have noticed a time or two that when fast forwarding in a song it'll buffer as if it's streaming. I've also went to play a song a couple times and noticed it buffering as well. Anyone else seen this????
has your music been uploaded as well as saved to the device? if so it may not have recognized that.
thats the only theory I have as I had an album on my device that got uploaded but it kept them separate. The only way I could tell is if i went to save to device and it was blacked out.
Yeah the music is both saved to the phone via usb transfer and has been uploaded onto the Google servers. But yeah it seems like it is keeping them separated for some reason ei. if the song is both on the phone and on the server when All Music is chosen it prefers to play from the server instead of the phone storage.
Maybe try just downloading the music to your device and get rid of the stuff you manually saved. Not sure how many files we are talking here. And naturally, you would want to do this via wifi
Sent from my Nexus 5 using Tapatalk
I've thought about that but we're talking about 20GB+ of music. lol Which really wouldn't be a big deal except that after any clean flash of a ROM I'd have to redownload everything again.
Then there's no point on having your music on the cloud
Sent from my Nexus 5 using xda app-developers app
That's how Google wants it though. It seems the only way to get album art working on the My Library widget is to upload your local music to google's servers but it seems in this case it is then streaming those files instead of using the local ones.
Sent from my Nexus 5 using Tapatalk
bblzd said:
That's how Google wants it though. It seems the only way to get album art working on the My Library widget is to upload your local music to google's servers
Sent from my Nexus 5 using Tapatalk
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^^^^Exactly, this is why I uploaded to the cloud^^^^ Even if I used id editors or album art editors after every rom flash I'd have to go back and reinput album art that was missing. At least this way the art stays. I do think I've found the culprit though. I had been using Bank's core gapps on SlimKat which requires you yo download most Google apps through the Play Store as this gapps package contains minimal apps. After using SlimKat's gapps again which has Google Play music as a system app and not a user app, it seems to have gone away. It really shouldn't matter how the app is installed but it seems to have helped.
AndrasLOHF said:
^^^^Exactly, this is why I uploaded to the cloud^^^^ Even if I used id editors or album art editors after every rom flash I'd have to go back and reinput album art that was missing. At least this way the art stays. I do think I've found the culprit though. I had been using Bank's core gapps on SlimKat which requires you yo download most Google apps through the Play Store as this gapps package contains minimal apps. After using SlimKat's gapps again which has Google Play music as a system app and not a user app, it seems to have gone away. It really shouldn't matter how the app is installed but it seems to have helped.
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I've searched the issue after running into it myself and there are unresolved forum posts all over about it. Even using Album grabbers to replace already existing art hasn't got the widget to show anything but blank squares for some including myself. Of course while listening to the music the album art works normally and replaces the lock screen.
Editing the ID tags might do the trick you say?

Google Assistant no longer plays LOCAL music from library with voice commands

I'm surprised this hasn't gotten any coverage from any android site thus far. If you have local music files (aka not streaming, files you've uploaded to google play music) you can no longer play these files with voice commands. Google claims to be looking into it but it hasn't been fixed in months.
https://productforums.google.com/forum/#!topic/websearch/kFCECV935SU;context-place=topicsearchin/websearch/category$3Aandroid%7Csort:relevance%7Cspell:false
is the only place i can find talking about it.
is anyone else having this problem and unhappy about it?
knives of ice said:
I'm surprised this hasn't gotten any coverage from any android site thus far. If you have local music files (aka not streaming, files you've uploaded to google play music) you can no longer play these files with voice commands. Google claims to be looking into it but it hasn't been fixed in months.
https://productforums.google.com/forum/#!topic/websearch/kFCECV935SU;context-place=topicsearchin/websearch/category$3Aandroid%7Csort:relevance%7Cspell:false
is the only place i can find talking about it.
is anyone else having this problem and unhappy about it?
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Click to collapse
I just got a new phone and I guess my old Nexus 5 (which I had upgraded to Nougat) didn't seem to have a problem but my new LG V30 has it. I can't seem to call on music like I used to, just by saying an artist or an artist and a song. I am not playing locally stored music (although that would also be nice) but music that I uploaded to the Google Play Music library. A terrible decision if this is how it is going to be.
knives of ice said:
I'm surprised this hasn't gotten any coverage from any android site thus far. If you have local music files (aka not streaming, files you've uploaded to google play music) you can no longer play these files with voice commands. Google claims to be looking into it but it hasn't been fixed in months.
https://productforums.google.com/forum/#!topic/websearch/kFCECV935SU;context-place=topicsearchin/websearch/category$3Aandroid%7Csort:relevance%7Cspell:false
is the only place i can find talking about it.
is anyone else having this problem and unhappy about it?
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
I'm running Nougat on my Xperia Z5.
When I tell the Google Assistant «Play the song "track title"», it searches in YouTube and tries to open YouTube app. However, sometimes it plays it from my local storage using Google Play Music app.
But whenever I disconnect my phone from internet, Google Assistant always plays the song from phone's local storage using the same command.
By the way, it's very irritating that I have to turn off Wi-Fi and mobile data whenever I wanna play a song from my phone's storage.

Google Play Music voice integration has been ruined since Google Home came out

Before Google Home came on the market I was able to use Google Assistant (and Google Home before that) to ask my phone to play particular songs or albums for instance I could say "OK Google play Iggy Pop - The Passenger" or "OK Google play Queens of the Stone Age - Villains (Album name)" and it would happily select it and play it.
Now since Google Home has appeared on the market if I ask the above I get a response saying that "Sorry the (insert Song title or Album name) isn't available in your area".
However this music is in my Google Play Music library and cached onto my phone so I don't see why I should pay for a subscription just to be able to get Google Assistant to play nicely with it.
In the end I have to ask Google Assistant to just play Iggy Pop (I can't select a particular album or track), then Google Play Music will try and play an Album I don't have and will usually have an error on the phone saying Offline playback not supported and then sometimes it will do nothing other times the whole app will crash.
I'm doing all of this whilst I'm driving so I can't have too much interaction with my phone, to try and manually select the music, so its a real pain.
I'm using a Google Pixel 2 XL, connected to my car via bluetooth.
Is anyone else seeing this problem and is there any remedy?

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