Music Storage

[e_ho20]

What's the deal with google music? I received my 8 gig Nexus 4 today, and I uploaded about 380 songs to google music during setup. They all show up in the cloud now, but when I tried to pin them to my phone, they take up huge amounts of space, filling up the internal storage less than halfway through. For example, I uploaded Good Kid Maad City by Kendrick Lamar with a couple songs already deleted. It was a total of 11 songs... But added up to about a third of a gigabyte by itself. I've never heard of 150 normal length songs taking up 5 gigs of storage. I realize I won't have much space with the 8 gig, but something is fishy when one album takes up over 300 megabytes.

 

[daryllh]

What quality mp3s are you uploading? Are you uploading wav files? That equals roughly 10mb per minute of stereo.

Only downloads I have dealt with are from albums I bought off of Google. Those are 320kbps mp3s. 3-5mb per song on average.

Sent from my LG-VM670 using Tapatalk 2

 

[e_ho20]

.mp3 files. They are all 160 kbps because I converted all my files to mp3 in an attempt to fix this. I'm at a loss for what's going on, because before this I had an LG myTouch with very little internal memory and a 4 gig memory card and it easily held my collection. Is there a file format I could convert my songs to that would take up less space?

 

[wunderbar]

here's another thing to consider. Have you been streaming music to the device along with the music you have pinned to local storage? The default setting when you stream music is that it will keep that streamed song stored locally, up to 2GB worth. This way if you want to listen to the same song or songs again it won't have to re-download them every time. Once you go past 2GB or your phone is starting to run out of room it'll start deleting the oldest of the music in that cache to make room. That could be what is eating up the space.

 

[e_ho20]

When this happened, I hadn't streamed at all. Very strange. I read up and found some stuff saying Google Music converts every file to 320 kbps when you upload. i think that may be the issue. I tried streaming today, though, and it was shockingly reliable even in areas where I normally get very little service. The only reason i was concerned was because I didn't think streaming would be that reliable. So I think the problem is solved.

 

[daryllh]

160kbps mp3s are small files. I wouldn't go any lower.

 

[e_ho20]

I decided to go with Mixzing and just put my 160 kbps files on the phone's internal memory. So far, no problems, and plenty of storage space left.