Google Music

[Droidintorrance]

I like to start a new thread for Verizon G-Nex Google Music users...

only been using G-Music for about a week; loving every bit of it; I only have about 682 tracks but more than half are 50megs+ hour long radio programs.. so I currently have automatic cache of 1.96GB of data... I have 25GB of free space left, which isn't much of a concern, and I can I know I can always manually clear the data.. but are any of you guys keeping an eye on how much Music caches? I don't have any tracks made offline...

Secondly, during the 4G blackout last night, I couldn't access my Music cache, ever track was offline, but if I were to start a tack on WiFi, then move to offline, then I'm able to access any cache tracks offline...

Third, when do you guys suppose ICS automatically clears or re-writes certain cache tracks.. and is there a limit to how big the cache is...? I can't seem to set the limits here...

Thanks...

 

[iBowToAndroid]

Those questions are better reserved for Google themselves since it's their app. You can turn off caching in settings though, if you don't want it to do it at all

 

[philosopherisdog]

These are great questions - I too am enjoying Google Music but am a bit perplexed by the offline music settings as well.

One thing that would be great is being able to use a song from Google Music to make a ringtone. Because the stuff is in the cloud, the ringtone maker apps I've tried don't recognize any music files on the phone (duh, they're in the cloud!) - even stuff I've "made available for offline listening" isn't available though.

I don't want to have to load a song onto my Nexus that is already in my google music account just to make a ringtone. In fact, wouldn't it just show up twice now when I go to shuffle an artist because of this?

With the current limitation of not being able to create a ringtone from these "cloud" or "cached" tracks, I think it would be best to just create the ringtones on my PC and then transfer them physically to the phone. That way they aren't muddling up Google Music (I would hope).

Google Music so far has brought great simplicity and elegance to my phone with this exception.

 

[qnet]

Those are good questions. I can't answer the other stuff but, when you make the music available offline it downloads to the storage on your phone. Since the Verizon Gnex has much more storage I just used Isyncr and installed all the music in my Itunes library that I could. Now when I buy new songs from Google music, I just make them available offline.

I started off just streaming it all but, that uses a lot of battery and is dependent on you data connection.

 

[iBowToAndroid]

One thing that would be great is being able to use a song from Google Music to make a ringtone. Because the stuff is in the cloud, the ringtone maker apps I've tried don't recognize any music files on the phone (duh, they're in the cloud!) - even stuff I've "made available for offline listening" isn't available though.

With the current limitation of not being able to create a ringtone from these "cloud" or "cached" tracks, I think it would be best to just create the ringtones on my PC and then transfer them physically to the phone. That way they aren't muddling up Google Music (I would hope).

Google Music so far has brought great simplicity and elegance to my phone with this exception.

There is a .nomedia file in the folder where the offline music is saved, so the system automatically ignores that folder when it searches

 

[elamb23]

I just started using Google music yesterday and needless to say I am still uploading my 1800 song off my laptop (12+ hours and counting). In hindsight I should have made sub folders and upload a few 100 every day instead of the whole shebang at once.

 

[BSG75]

I can tell you this from my experience, downloading a track and caching it offline takes up about the same space as the original track. So a 10mb mp3 track that I uploaded to Google Music takes up about the same 10mb when I download it for offline use. I tested this with large playlists that I uploaded then cached. The playlist was about 6 gigs. to do this, click on a song, album or playliats and check the "Make available for offline use" box. It will download via data or wifi, depending on your settings.

If your music is available offline, you should not need 4g or anything. I often put my phone in airplane mode and play offline tracks.

If you are asking about the "Cache music" setting (different from offline use), I think that only caches a track you are currently playing. So if you are streaming music, it will download (cache) the entire track, so if you lose data, you can still finish the track. I expect this cache only lasts the duration of the song (it says the music is stored "temporarily").