Just wondering if anyone has any advice or if anyone else has experienced this... When I'm not on a WiFi connection and I use Google Play Music to play stuff from the cloud, it uses soooo much data! I played about 5 mins of stuff while watching data usage in My Data Manger and it had eaten through nearly 100mb! Then I tested spotify and it used maybe 5mb playing around 10 mins of music. Anyone know why there's such a huge difference? I'm on an "unlimited" data plan that actually has a 1gb upload/download fair usage limit so can't afford to burn through that kind of rate.
Google Play Music using tonnes of mobile data!
- Thread starter daveshorty
- Start date
I think GMusic starts caching the whole album as soon as you start the first song. At least that is one possible explanation. I have mine set to only stream/sync over wifi and just mark a dozen albums or so that I want for offline use.
When you stream it if you go to the menu and go to download it shows you it gets a few songs at a time to cache.
The reason it uses more data also is because it downloads the same file you uploaded or compresses it to 320kbps mp3 if it's something higher(like a loss less format)
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The reason it uses more data also is because it downloads the same file you uploaded or compresses it to 320kbps mp3 if it's something higher(like a loss less format)
Sent from my SPH-L710 using Android Central Forums
Citizen Coyote
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- Jul 9, 2011
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This is my understanding of how it works. Unlike Spotify, which compresses the stream and only sends you what you need to buffer the current song, Google Play sends you songs in advance and will give you whatever you uploaded to the cloud (or whatever it has if you're playing an album purchased on Play).
So, as others above have said, you can either switch to a different music service, or you can download a selection of tracks for offline use.
You can also turn off stream in high quality only. Play music is terrible if u arent on wifi or dont have unlimited. Put music on you phone if you like listening to music.
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TheLibertarian
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- Sep 3, 2012
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SD cards for a phone with no expandable memory?
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I just ran into this same issue too trying out the new "all access" radio feature, burned through over a gig of my data plan in one day. With sony music unlimited I use about 500MB a week. After doing some googling I think it has to do with how they handle the streaming bit rate. There is an option to force high quality, but no option to force low quality. So you basically get the option of auto or high. The auto adjusts bit rate based on available bandwidth. The problem is that I am in an LTE area which means auto is always high(320kbps).
320kbps/8b = 40K per sec
40K*60min = 2.4M per min
2.4M*60min = 144M per hour
144M*8hrs = 1.152G per work day!
*estimated on base 10 math
So it looks like this kind of data usage is actually by design... So the question then is, how do we simulate low available bandwidth so Google music will not auto stream high quality? Dial *#*#4636*#*# from the phone dial pad and a hidden menu will come up. Select "Device Information", then in the "set preferred network type" drop down I selected "GSM only". I have now only used about 20M in the past half an hour, which would put me around 40M an hour and 320M for a full work day. With an average of 22 work days in a month, that's about 7 gigs a month. That's if I stream a full 8 hours which I would say most time I probably do about 5hrs. So maybe about 4 gigs a month... A touch higher than the 3 gigs other streaming services I have used typically go through... but way better than a gig a day! Anyway, hope this helps someone!
320kbps/8b = 40K per sec
40K*60min = 2.4M per min
2.4M*60min = 144M per hour
144M*8hrs = 1.152G per work day!
*estimated on base 10 math
So it looks like this kind of data usage is actually by design... So the question then is, how do we simulate low available bandwidth so Google music will not auto stream high quality? Dial *#*#4636*#*# from the phone dial pad and a hidden menu will come up. Select "Device Information", then in the "set preferred network type" drop down I selected "GSM only". I have now only used about 20M in the past half an hour, which would put me around 40M an hour and 320M for a full work day. With an average of 22 work days in a month, that's about 7 gigs a month. That's if I stream a full 8 hours which I would say most time I probably do about 5hrs. So maybe about 4 gigs a month... A touch higher than the 3 gigs other streaming services I have used typically go through... but way better than a gig a day! Anyway, hope this helps someone!
Stream on wifi or pin music to the device. Streaming music over 3G is also really hard on the battery. You can almost watch the meter go down 
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