Help deleting all of the songs on my new Pixel phone.

[AC Question]

I purchased a Google Pixel phone and followed prompts from the Pixel to connect it to my old iPhone to sync messages, contacts, photos, etc. Overall, the sync worked well; however, it did a poor job with the audio files. All of the music, podcasts, and audiobooks are now mixed together in the Play Music app. I want to delete all of these audio files so I can manually input only the music from my PC to the Google Play Music browser interface (to exclude the podcasts and audiobooks), and then download these files back onto the Pixel.

So far, I can only figure out how to delete one song at a time from the phone, which will take me 3-4 hours to delete them all. I tried selecting Settings->Storage->Audio and then selecting all of the folders, but after I "Select all", I cannot find a delete option. With the Play Music App, I can select individual songs and delete them, but I cannot find a "Select all" option. Does anyone know a more efficient method to delete these downloaded songs?

 

[B. Diddy]

Welcome to Android Central! Do you have a PC or Mac? If you have a PC, connect the phone via USB, swipe down the notification panel, tap the USB option, and make sure MTP is selected. Then open Windows Explorer on the computer, select the phone, and navigate to the directory where the music is stored. You can multi-select files and delete them from there.

 

[MaliPostar]

What if you have a Mac?

 

[butimirish]

I have a great option.

Navigate to Settings->Storage->Audio, you'll see all your folders and as you said you can select all but not delete.

However, at the top you can search (which will recurse through all children folders) and search results will be single songs. So search for each vowel (a,e,i,o,u) one at a time and when you get each result just long click the first song, select all, delete. Doing each vowel should pretty much catch them all and only will take you a minute. When a folder becomes empty, it is automatically deleted, thus after completing all vowels the audio folder should be empty. Boom.

 

[T DW]

Just figured out how to do this. If you can't access the files on your phone when you plug it in to your computer, it's probably because you haven't enabled data transfering on your phone. Go into your phone, pull down the notification bar on your phone, go all the way to the bottom of your notifications where it says "Android system: Charging this device from USB", tap on that, tap where it says "Tap for more options", then switch it from "no data transfer" to "file transfer" and boom, everything in your phone should be accessible on your computer, like a USB memory stick. You can delete or move around anything you like.