Why is Play Music so huge?

[Steve_S_T]

I've just noticed that Google Play Music is showing as taking up 1.04gb of space on my N4. This is somewhat surprising for a cloud service app, more so given that I have virtually no songs stored locally on the phone. Can anybody enlighten me as to why Music likes to hog so much space on the phone?

Thanks,

Steve.



Sent from my Nexus 4 using Tapatalk 2

 

[Xelion]

Mine takes up 444KB. Do you have music selected as to be stored offline? That's the only thing I can think of.

Edit: Well scratch that, I reread your post. That does seem crazy.

 

[zorak950]

Do you have automatic caching on? Even if you don't tell it to save specific songs to local memory, by default it will fill up unused memory with the songs you play on it since it has to download them anyway. If you need the space later, it just empties the cache as needed.

 

[Fraser Carter]

Go to Google Play Music Settings, and untick "Automatically Cache" if its still causing you a problem.

:-*:-*:-*

 

[Steve_S_T]

Thanks for the replies all. I did have "Automatically Cache" checked so have now undone that and deleted the data so am starting again with a clean cache. It will be interesting to see if the auto cache affects performance in any way, but I know that the data delete hasn't fixed the incorrect album covers. Whilst I like Play Music it still has a good way to go on the functionality front.

Thanks again all,

Steve.

 

[anon(847090)]

Thanks for the replies all. I did have "Automatically Cache" checked so have now undone that and deleted the data so am starting again with a clean cache. It will be interesting to see if the auto cache affects performance in any way, but I know that the data delete hasn't fixed the incorrect album covers. Whilst I like Play Music it still has a good way to go on the functionality front.

Thanks again all,

Steve.

it will affect performance in a way. cache will make your music play quick which you have already played. if not cached it will fetch the music from cloud again.
You will see a slight delay. if you have enough space caching can save you bandwith

 

[minnemike]

Yeah - I do not believe there is anything native to google drive that streams your music to google play. So if you listen to anything, it gets cached. I bought a cloud streaming app that lets me just stream from google drive and box - it's sweet! Ultimate mobile jukebox.

 

[Michael Rodgers]

Personally I'm a big fan of this feature, since it ensures that stuff I listen to often is automatically on the phone and I don't have to use bandwidth to stream it twice (or things I first listened to on wifi and thus never use any data plan bandwidth). I do wish there was a way to set the limit to user defined limits (500mb of cache, 1gb of cache, etc).

 

[anon(847090)]

Yeah - I do not believe there is anything native to google drive that streams your music to google play. So if you listen to anything, it gets cached. I bought a cloud streaming app that lets me just stream from google drive and box - it's sweet! Ultimate mobile jukebox.

what app is that?

 

[donec]

I've just noticed that Google Play Music is showing as taking up 1.04gb of space on my N4. This is somewhat surprising for a cloud service app, more so given that I have virtually no songs stored locally on the phone. Can anybody enlighten me as to why Music likes to hog so much space on the phone?

Thanks,

Steve.



Sent from my Nexus 4 using Tapatalk 2

Clear your cache and see if that helps clear the stuff?

 

[cbrace]

I have been seeing this behavior on a Nexus 7 tablet with 8GB storage. After a couple of months, the Play Music cache was taking upwards of 5GB, basically all unused space on the device. Problem is though that the Android OS began reporting low space, automatic updates stopped working, and a given moment even the Music app would't work any more due to lack of space to cache music.

It appears that the Play Music app will basically expand its cache to use ALL available space. The developers really need to build in some kind of mechanism to limit the cache from getting too big.

 

[someguy01234]

Simply go into Google Music setting and disable caching.

sent via tapatalk

 

[Eric Mazariegos]

Under Play Music settings, scroll down to Automatically cache, and Cache during playback. Uncheck both.

Although as others have mentioned, allowing this feature vastly improves the usability of this app as it will store music you play once and not use data to stream it again, as well as storing songs streamed via WiFi and then not streaming them on a mobile connection. Personally, I have a limited data connection so I am always using this feature and the Stream over WiFi only feature as well. I am not very app crazy so the 4gb of storage it is currently taking up on my Nexus 4 isn't all that bad. Hopefully you can sort this out.

 

[saxbop]

THANK YOU!!! My phone (Samsung S3)'s memory was FULL, yet I had very little loaded on the phone. The phone was essentially non-functional; all the apps quit. Then, by accident, I noticed that Google Play Music had swallowed 9.4 gigs --- and I hadn't used it for a month! I turned off the automatic caching, bit the bullet and deleted the data on Google Play Music (I fist deauthorized my phone since I was afraid that it would delete all my songs on the cloud....), and the memory is now empty and the phone works again! I second the commentator who suggested a user-defined limit for the cache feature, which would be useful. Thanks again!