Google Play and Profiles

[HerrDeacon]

I recently copied some albums to my Nexus 7 (dropped them in the Music folder) and have been playing them via Google Play. I'm in Canada so I'm not setup for the cloud playing. All this works fine, but when my daughter wanted to listen to some music I opened Google Play in her profile to show her how its done and to my surprise there were no albums showing.

I just connected to the N7 to my PC so I could look for the files to make sure I put them in the correct place and couldn't find them! Turns out, when I connected to my PC I had her N7 profile open. I switched to my profile while still connected and voila...I could now see these files.

Is there anyway to make it so all profiles on the N7 can access the same music files?

 

[anon(847090)]

how is it that when u connect to PC her profile folder comes?? there is no concept of your/her profile when you connect to PC!
its one big storage.

 

[HerrDeacon]

That's what I don't understand at all either. Actually, when I was connected (and on her profile on the N7), I switched profiles to mine without disconnecting and then another Windows Explorer window opened up automatically with all the same folder layout, but I could now see my music files. Very strange. I'm going to play with it some more over the weekend to see what's up.

 

[HerrDeacon]

Doing a bit of searching and found this page that explains the reason: Hands-on: Multiple users, lock screen widgets round out Android 4.2 | Ars Technica

Users also can't share data directly with one another; if you want to transfer a picture to another user's account, you'll have to e-mail it to them or share it through some other third-party service. Even if you plug the device into a PC or Mac, you can only view the media files of the tablet's current user. Switching users with the tablet connected to a computer will unmount the tablet and then remount it to give you access to the other user's files. This is a little annoying from a usability perspective, though from a security perspective it's definitely a nice touch.

Guess I'll have to live with it, although its probably a good thing, she wouldn't want to listen to my music and vice versa.