Local music support?

[ireknole]

Are there any apps for Android auto that let you play music stored on your SD card? Streaming everything I listen to would destroy my data plan.

I know I can upload them to Google music and then download them to my phone, but then the files would be unreadable to other music players.

Posted via the Android Central App

 

[biotron2000]

Does your head unit have an SD card slot? I have Pioneer 4100 and it does. The only bad thing is it only plays tracks in alphabetical order.

 

[ireknole]

Does your head unit have an SD card slot? I have Pioneer 4100 and it does. The only bad thing is it only plays tracks in alphabetical order.

I don't have anything yet, but I'm sure it will. Unfortunately, that means I would be using a function outside of android auto which I'm trying to avoid. I guess the Google option will my best choice for now. Maybe I'll bug the developer of player pro and see if he can port his app over.

Posted via the Android Central App

 

[Ernie Whalen]

The closest thing inside of Android Auto that I'm familiar with would be uploading your music to Google Play Music. An alternative would be uploading your music onto a USB flash drive and playing the music from there. Most of the music in Android Auto is streaming existing music.

 

[ireknole]

The closest thing inside of Android Auto that I'm familiar with would be uploading your music to Google Play Music. An alternative would be uploading your music onto a USB flash drive and playing the music from there. Most of the music in Android Auto is streaming existing music.

Thank you! Hopefully that will change soon as almost no one has unlimited data plans anymore. The only thing I wonder is if you download your music to the SD card, if google music will play the local copy rather than stream the copy on its servers. Same question actually applies to Spotify and Pocketcasts as well.

 

[Pedrore]

These apps will behave the same way they do on your phone, so no differently than with Android Auto. So, if your podcast app allows you to download episodes for offline playback, those files will play from the app under Android Auto using the local download. The Google Play Music app does allow you to download copies to your device from your own (previously uploaded) music library but I think you have to do that on an album by album basis. You can also set the Google Play Music app to only play from downloaded copies and avoid streaming.

 

[ireknole]

These apps will behave the same way they do on your phone, so no differently than with Android Auto. So, if your podcast app allows you to download episodes for offline playback, those files will play from the app under Android Auto using the local download. The Google Play Music app does allow you to download copies to your device from your own (previously uploaded) music library but I think you have to do that on an album by album basis. You can also set the Google Play Music app to only play from downloaded copies and avoid streaming.

That's great news! Thank you!

I'll be downloading by playlist most likely, so it'll still be a bit time consuming.

Can you check "download only" from within android auto or do you have to do it on your phone before plugging into the car?

Sent from my SM-N910V using Tapatalk

 

[Pedrore]

The "downloaded only" is a toggle setting in the menu of the Play Music app on your phone. Also, if you go to My Library in the app and the Playlists section, you can download by playlist.

 

[ireknole]

The "downloaded only" is a toggle setting in the menu of the Play Music app on your phone. Also, if you go to My Library in the app and the Playlists section, you can download by playlist.

Perfect! Thank you! Two more questions:

Is the option to jump to artist or album when listening to a song available in Android auto?

Can you random shuffle all the songs in your library?

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[ireknole]

Random find today. Amazon Music has a "shuffle my offline songs" option. I pressed it and it started shuffling my music! I don't have songs other than what I've purchased stored on Amazon's cloud (not that I know of at least) and it was playing songs I didn't buy from them. I'll need to find out where it is pulling these songs from, but so far it's an exciting discovery!

Edit: I checked it out in the full app and it looks like Amazon pulled the music stored on my phone for offline playback.

So that's the solution for shuffling your local music - Amazon Music!

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[Victor Howard]

For local files, Google Music can access playlists or just start playing alphabetically. No scrolling for artists or albums. Playlists will load in about 20 song increments, so it can take a while to find what you want.
It's something that really needs to be improved upon going forward.

 

[ireknole]

For local files, Google Music can access playlists or just start playing alphabetically. No scrolling for artists or albums. Playlists will load in about 20 song increments, so it can take a while to find what you want.
It's something that really needs to be improved upon going forward.

How do you get it to just start playing your music library alphabetically?

Also, I just realized a potential problem with voice control for playlists, unless I'm not doing it right. A lot of my playlists are artist names. So I'll say play playlist [artist name] and it will start to play songs from that artist only, not the playlist I have set up. Is there any way around that or do I just have to rename my playlists?

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[Victor Howard]

So my bad. Because of space limitations, I don't have 100% of my music on my phone. I make a playlist with the music I want on my phone and sync that over. So when I play that playlist, it starts at A.

I looked at the AA-compatible apps and there's a new music player that's there: MDPlayer. On my drive home tonight, I'm going to check its functionality on AA. Maybe artist and album scrolling is possible.

 

[ireknole]

So my bad. Because of space limitations, I don't have 100% of my music on my phone. I make a playlist with the music I want on my phone and sync that over. So when I play that playlist, it starts at A.

I looked at the AA-compatible apps and there's a new music player that's there: MDPlayer. On my drive home tonight, I'm going to check its functionality on AA. Maybe artist and album scrolling is possible.

Ah. I've considered doing that master playlist, but I heard playlists can only have 1,000 songs and I have 5,000+ in my library.

I have MD player and tried it out, but it's not great. You can shuffle all the music in your library, but it doesn't pick up playlists that are already on your phone. You also can't add folders to the exclude or include list when it scans for music. It's possible that I'm missing something, but I'm usually good at figuring out apps and programs and this one is just not user friendly at all.

Amazon Music also seems to have a "shuffle offline music" feature, but I can't tell the source it's pulling from. I believe it's what's on my phone though.

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[JerryL643]

JetAudio Plus now supports Android Auto. I don't know how I stumbled across it because Google doesn't list it on their list of supported apps. And I thought they all had to be approved by Google to get Android Auto support.

But, it does support it and it's awesome.

 

[fragilemn]

Yes, Jet Audio is probably the best for local music right now. It also shows up for me on AA, even though it is not officially listed on the Google approved apps list. However it used to be on that list a few months ago, i noticed it come up on AA one day and i checked and it was on the list then. I'm not sure how exactly that list manifests itself onto our head units or the interface between head unit and phone, since in this case there seems to be at least one inconsistency. I assumed my access to it was some sort of residual result of it having been an approved app at one time and me accessing it during that time, but possibly thats not the cause. Maybe Google forgot to turn off some switch for it.

Actually lately my jetaudio just spins on AA when i bring it up. Jetaudio suggested to me to start jetaudio on my phone first before I connect it to AA, i havent tried that yet. So perhaps it got pulled because of this spinning circle issue.