Google Music - Issue with playing local files

[mr_yip]

Ever since I registered my Google Music account with my phone's (Samsung Galaxy S4 AT&T) Google Music app, my phone wants to stream most of my music. I was listening to all my music off of my 32 GB SD card perfectly fine with no issues before the update. Now, my phone must be connected to wi-fi or a data connection to play my music that is already stored in the SD card. With my limited data plan, I now have to listen to my music only while I am at home or connected to wi-fi. I've tried reinstalling the app and deleting my music (1,200 songs) off the card and putting it back on but this didn't solve any of my issues.

I want to be able to use Google Music to manage my music on both my phone and PC but I want to keep all my music files on my phone and play them locally. What's strange is that while the application will refuse to play a song without a data connection, I can browse into my SD files and select and play the song there.

Does anyone have any advice?

Thanks

 

[B. Diddy]

Does it say "All Music" at the upper left? If so, tap on it and select "On Device Only," then try again.

Sent from my DROID RAZR using Android Central Forums

 

[mr_yip]

I've tried that, it doesn't seem to work. I've used rescan media apps to rescan the SD card as well, and tried the "refresh music" button as well. I just deleted all my music off the SD card again and I pinned most of music so now it is just re-downloading slowly via wi-fi...

Although I am just realizing that all my music will not fit onto the internal storage because of all the bloatware nor will I be able to add any more music. >.>

So far I'm missing my iPhone.

 

[B. Diddy]

If you want your music local, don't pin it. Downloading from the cloud is really meant to be a temporary measure, and as you said, you're limited as to how much you can pin and download.

You should be able to transfer a whole ton of music to a microSD card on your computer, then insert it into your phone and have Google Music read it. Label the folder "Music," and make sure it's not a subfolder of another folder.

If you're still having problems, try going to Settings/Apps/All, select Play Music, and clear the cache and the data. When you restart the app, it should rescan everything and rebuild its library.

Sent from my DROID RAZR using Android Central Forums

 

[mr_yip]

Thanks for the help.

What I've come up with through research is that the music app has an issue with playing the local files that are on playlists on the cloud. So if you make a playlist on your computer, it won't be able to be played on your android device without a data connection or without pinning it...or at least, that's what it seems like.

 

[B. Diddy]

Weird bug, but I can totally see that happening. Let me experiment with it on my phone.

 

[B. Diddy]

I thought about this a little more, and it makes sense that your Playlists in the cloud will only play if you're connected to the internet. If you think about it, there's a good chance that most people will not have their entire cloud music library stored locally as well on an SD card. If the Playlist in the cloud is referencing the cloud library, then there's a good chance that some of the songs on the Playlist won't be stored locally, and therefore the Playlist won't play correctly. So in order for it to play correctly, it requires you to be connected to the web.

You can create a Playlist for On Device music, but this is a little tedious, since you have to go to each indvidual track on your device, hit the context menu, and then select Add to Playlist.