I found not what i would call a fix for this, but definitely a workaround for those who do not want to root I'm sure if you rooted and knew what you were doing a little better, there's an infinitely better way to go about this. After all that searching and no luck finding anyone else that could serve up any kind of working solution, i felt obligated to share this somewhere, but bear in mind, this is absolutely NOT an easy fix. This is after an entire night of googling every possible combination of keywords i could think of, trolling countless forum posts, and ultimately cobbling together a solution based on little bits of advice here and there, so i apologize in advance if this explanation runs a little long. I would very much like to make this a succinct, easily digestible post, but frankly i just don't see that happening in a way that can even hope to help anyone that doesn't have EXACTLY my car and my sound system. so settle in for a god damned dissertation. lol. finally, i must note that you almost certainly want to read through the whole thing before beginning to act on it, to see if this solution is at all right for you. i think that should go without saying really, but i felt like i should mention it anyway, just to prevent anyone from raging.
Disclaimer: This work around is both tedious, and memory intensive for your device, as it basically involves downloading double copies of all your music and placing it in a different location on your phone where your car's stereo can find it. It's also relatively limited in terms of what it will allow you to do... I'm almost positive this won't support any sort of streaming service... (i know... this is FAR from a fix, but it's a workaround for stored music)
running my music on google play a galaxy note 3, and using in a 2014 mini cooper (non mini connected package, for those familiar) with a harmon kardon sound system (just for the sake of full transparency)
what I have basically been able to surmise is that (at least if using google play) the music you purchase through the store and then 'keep on device' or download by clicking the little button next to the cover art, does get stored on your phone but in one way or another becomes a hidden file of sorts. This is where the problem lies as your car's sound system is unable to discover the music thanks to this.
to work around this:
Getting your music in a workable location on your phone:
1) go to the google play website on your desktop or laptop computer.
2) download all of your music
3) organize your music into a series of folders to make it easy to access through whatever controls your car has
--- this is the most tedious part of the process, and the way I've done it has doubled the amount of storage space my music takes up on my device. The first multiple being the old storage in google play which i don't want to get rid of in order to provide easier listening via headphones and stuff when it's not in my car. the 2nd multiple being all of my songs organized into different artist folders (and in some cases album folders within the artist folders, depending on how many songs i have by that artist). you could feasibly just delete all the original storage by removing the songs from storage through google play, but that didn't sound appealing to me as i wanted a clean ui for headphone listening etc. There is quite probably a much more elegant way to organize your music into artists and playlists etc by using itunes or windows media player or something, but i just couldn't be bothered to figure out how to solve another problem in order to work back around to solve my original problem. That's what we call feature creep in the ad business and i just wasn't down. To my knowledge this work around does not allow you to easily switch between one folder and another on the fly (or at least not with the steering wheel in my car) so if you decide you want to switch gears (heh, driving pun) to another artist or album while you're out and about be prepared to pull over to use the stereo console to navigate back through the folders. However you decide to break this all down, just make sure that at the end you throw the collection of folders into a single folder called 'my music' or something to that effect, to make the whole thing easy to access.
4) Plug your android into your computer
5) Open up the files on your phone
6) open either on 'phone' or 'card' folder depending on your preference/if you have expandable SD
7) open the existing 'Music' folder and place your new 'my music' folder within here
--You can actually put your new collection of files basically where ever you want at this point, the existing music file just seemed to make sense to me. the reason i didn't just dump everything directly in the existing music folder is because there are a few hidden files in here for different notification sounds and stuff, and i didn't want these getting mixed in with my tunes.
8) once you have done this and placed your music in the desired location, you're done with this part! (don't forget where you put it though! you'll need to remember to access it from your car)
Accessing the music from your car:
Disclaimer: This part may be tricky for others, as i have absolutely no idea how each individual stereo system works, and if you don't have any way to use your stereo to navigate your files you may be kind of screwed
1) using the multimedia menu on my cars stereo
2) select my phone from a list including auxiliary and another option
3) browse directory
4) navigate though the huge list of files until i find music
5) then open my music
6) then i have access to the files i created
some notes on how it operates:
- if i go into a folder and select a song it will cycle through all the songs in that folder
- if i press my options button on my stereo i can select from two kinds of random
-the first one 'current playback' chooses randomly from any of the songs located in the same folder as whatever song i'm listening to at the moment
-the second one 'all titles' will cycle between all of the songs I've added
-I'm not exactly sure if this will ultimately end up playing weird other sound bytes for notifications and such, but in my testing it seemed to only access the songs i added. this may be because i stored all the music within the original music folder that the phone came with, or it may be something else... I'm really not sure.
Ultimately, this is an incredibly tedious and very stupid thing to have to do to be able to to easily play our music, charge our phones, and make use of steering wheel controls, all using one clean cord... BUT, it works, and you don't have to root your device. Is it incredibly stupid? yes. Is it a huge pain in the ***? most definitely. Is there a better way to work around this? ALMOST CERTAINLY... but i haven't the slightest ******* clue what that might be. if anyone that sees this does, PLEASE share. Maybe there's some third party music player app that makes this simple... maybe there's a way to unlock the files in their original storage location with google play (most likely through some kind of rooting-black-magic)... MAYBE I JUST SHOULD HAVE GOTTEN A DAMN BOOMBOX FOR THE CAR TO PLUG MY PHONE INTO... but god damn it, i was determined to get this to work... and i damn well did. lol
I'm going to sleep now >.< my brain is ******* fried. Good luck to everyone!
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