How happy are you with Google Music? - AT&T Samsung Galaxy S II SGH-I777

What features would you like to see added/removed, and are you happy with it compared to the stock music app, or how do you feel it stacks up against another music app.
*This is a general topic, and I'm just curious to see the community's response.*

I don't use it. It doesn't have features I need.
Namely, ability to keep the screen from sleeping, and the ability to limit where it looks for music at.

i like gmusic. I dont use it daily (I use slacker daily) but gmusic works great when I do need it. Its far more reliable than when it first came out, so they're definitely making progress.
My only complaint is when I flash a new rom, it registers my phone as a new device so it adds it to gmusic (which is great) but google limits it to 8 devices. So occasionally I need to go into gmusic website and delete my old devices, which is all the same phone. Its not really a complaint for google but i wish there was a way for it to detect that its the same device/IMEI

I personally love google music I use it daily. I have a computer for school and don't want to cramp it up with music so I can stream everything. Also I use my phone in my truck for music and it is nice to have access to all my music when I need it.

Absolutely love it. I have my entire collection stored. My main problem lies when I'm doing file management and the media scanner starts while I'm playing music. Google Music stops streaming completely and I have to manually restart it. I turned caching off, so that the song being played is solely dependent on the connection, but it still does it. I suppose it stops to look for new songs that might have been added. I'd like it to at least resume playback when scanning stops.
The other thing is with optimization I guess. In my last billing cycle, I got throttled and streaming was impossible (as expected). However, Pandora was still able to stream entire songs, for long sessions without stutter (it just took longer between songs). I'm curious if it'd be possible for them to improve performance on slow networks, so that it's on par with Pandora.

Alucardis666 said:
*This is a general topic, and I'm just curious to see the community's response.*
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
General is something related directly to the phone or an app that comes stock with the phone. GoogleMusic does not fit that description since it has to be installed by the user and not everyone uses it. This should have been in Themes and Apps. Just sayin'.

I wish it would sync with a folder on my phone with all my music, so that when it tries to play a song, it checks that folder on my phone first before downloading the song with a weird name in another random folder. That way, whenever I add a song on my computer to the Google Music Folder, it adds to my phone as well when I try to play it, keeping my music in sync.

yahoowizard said:
I wish it would sync with a folder on my phone with all my music, so that when it tries to play a song, it checks that folder on my phone first before downloading the song with a weird name in another random folder. That way, whenever I add a song on my computer to the Google Music Folder, it adds to my phone as well when I try to play it, keeping my music in sync.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
That'd be boss. Maybe in a future update?

I love google music.
Especially after switching from iTunes and my iPhone 4. I really hated iTunes haha

i like it on my zoom and Google TV. But I wish it would sync playlist too. A good playlist takes time and it wouldn't be nice to listen to them on phone, tablet and TV. The main thing that make be go back to the Samsung music player is that while connected to my Bluetooth stereo it shows track info on the stereo but the Google music doesn't. Not a big thing, but enough to keep me using the samsung player. If those two were fixed it would be a perfect player.

K Rich said:
I love google music.
Especially after switching from iTunes and my iPhone 4. I really hated iTunes haha
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
I too converted, and couldn't be happier.

Absolutely love Google music. No complaints here, it works great. I'm really happy that Google came out with this app, I show everyone with an Android phone.

im using PowerAmp i think its better than gMusic

Not bad... Steaming better but still slower than other streaming apps.
My biggest complaint is music purchased can only be played in gmusic and can't be downloaded to phone or computer. Frustrating when I paid for something. if they keep prices at $4.99 album $.49 song I might get over it... Doubtful that will last.
Saw app in market that claims to make music portable though.
SHOstock
DD12/21 exp
Onepointsixingit

mjgspr95 said:
Not bad... Steaming better but still slower than other streaming apps.
My biggest complaint is music purchased can only be played in gmusic and can't be downloaded to phone or computer. Frustrating when I paid for something. if they keep prices at $4.99 album $.49 song I might get over it... Doubtful that will last.
Saw app in market that claims to make music portable though.
SHOstock
DD12/21 exp
Onepointsixingit
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
Just click on the song you purchased and click download. It will let you download it at 320k and no drm. Also the google music manager has an option to auto download any purchased songs to your pc automatically.
---------- Post added at 09:01 AM ---------- Previous post was at 08:59 AM ----------
I would really like to be able to download my music that was uploaded to google music. I had everything in itunes also, and one day after it was all uploaded itunes moved everything without me knowing it and that file got deleted on accident. Of course i didn't care at the time because nothing should have been there. Thanks itunes.

benk016 said:
Also the google music manager has an option to auto download any purchased songs to your pc automatically.
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Click to collapse
Automagically? I missed that. Cool.
Sent from my Galaxy SII

My only complaint is the shuffle feature isnt very good at all, I only have a library of about 400 songs yet some songs I never hear when I use shuffle all n some songs I will hear twice in a 10 song span. I use gmusic daily n love it other than that.
Sent from my SAMSUNG-SGH-I777 using XDA App

Love it!!!
Sent from my SGH-I777 using Tapatalk

I wish there was a way to manage the songs on the server from the phone. I sent all my music to the server and now run across songs (when in shuffle) that I no longer want. Would like to delete the song off the server from my phone.

mjgspr95 said:
Not bad... Steaming better but still slower than other streaming apps.
My biggest complaint is music purchased can only be played in gmusic and can't be downloaded to phone or computer. Frustrating when I paid for something. if they keep prices at $4.99 album $.49 song I might get over it... Doubtful that will last.
Saw app in market that claims to make music portable though.
SHOstock
DD12/21 exp
Onepointsixingit
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
uhh, yes it can...

Related

Music Syncing

I need to know what/how people are syncing their music with their phones. I purchased MediaMonkey for me and my gf (we both have I777) and was able to sync my playlist in MediaMonkey to the phone. However, I messed up the playlist. I added a file to the root of the external SD card called '.isaudioplayer' and that caused the m3u file to have incorrect paths. When I viewed the m3u file in a text editor on the phone, It said F:/Music/yadda. Obviously, F: is wrong. How are your playlists listed? Thanks for the assistance!
have you thought about using google music? No need to sync your music at all. Just stream from the app.
+1 on google music, I use it every day and love it
I have Google Music. I don't like it. The Android app sucks. I tell it to only play local music, and it plays online music anyway. The app won't reload it's list of music (after an upload to the SD card). I have to reboot the phone to get the app to see the new music. I have uploaded my library to Google Music, but I wasn't finished tagging the library correctly. So basically, I need to finish tagging the library correctly, erase everything on Google Music, and then re-upload. Then create playlists. Not to mention the fact, that I have MythTV at home to play music in my living room, and Subsonic to stream music to the phone/work desktop. I hate having to create playlists. That's the worst thing in the world. If Google actually created/released APIs for Google music, then MediaMonkey/MythTV could integrate (not to mention the really cool CM9 inspired new Music app out there).
I also received a message from AT&T telling me I was in the top 5% of users this month. I find that completely unbelievable. I only stream music for ~20 minutes a day. Be it from home via Subsonic, or Google Music. So having it local helps. Not to mention the GF is on my plan now, but we only gave her 2GBs. That will just be eaten up by Google Music.
But the biggest issue is I want the music on my phone because when I hit the fitness room in the basement of my office, I get 0 WLAN bars and 0 3G bars. So I need local music. GF also has the issue of signal strength where she goes.
Does anyone have a playlist.m3u file I could look at to see the proper format of the file? Also, is there anyone else like me out there that actually puts music on their phones now?
I tried media monkey, but ultimately it didn't work out for me. What I ended up doing was using winamp on the computer to sync my music and playlists to my phone, actually my SD card. I lose the ability to do wireless sync, but I like keeping all of my music on the external memory. Also, I didn't really like the winamp for android, so I switched to using playerpro. The playlists and everything work out very nicely, and they stay in sync.
Sent from my SGH-I777 using xda premium
iSyncr or doubleTwist Airsync i'd suggest looking into. They are probably the top of the list aside from Google Music.
I've been using doubleTwist and it is everything i could need however it comes with a whole new Media Program to install (stills syncs with iTunes though).
iSyncr is nice if you only want to use iTunes because it's basically an "addon" and this way you don't need a whole new media managing program.
Google Music is very basic and simple. You might as well get it anyways as a backup but I don't personally like the app/online management of music; it is just too difficult to edit files. However if you want to go this route you can get Google Music Importer which will let you save the music you pin for offline mode from within the android app to be used in other music app's (otherwise you are forced with always using the Google Music app to play the music from online).
Tried iSync and doubletwist and settled on iSync. so I keep my music on itunes and just sync with the phone.
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I used iSyncr for a while, worked great, but I hated being tied down to iTunes. Bought MediaMonkey and, after some configs, I love it.
I have it set so that songs are:
/sdcard/MediaMonkey/Music/songs
And playlists:
/sdcard/MediaMonkey/Music/playlists
And I have the playlists to have relative paths, so drive letters don't matter.
PlayerPro works just fine with this setup. So does PowerAMP.
Here's my device config XML, just import in MediaMonkey if you like.
Syncing? What's that?
I just copy everything I want to listen to, to /my_music on the internal storage.
Edit: I don't use playlists either, blegh.
jhermit said:
Tried iSync and doubletwist and settled on iSync. so I keep my music on itunes and just sync with the phone.
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Click to collapse
Thanks for the suggestions all. We are trying to move away from iTunes at home. The fact is that iTunes on Windows doesn't support FLAC audio. It does on OS X, but I'm not going that route. I guess I just deal with the faults of MediaMonkey. But really, if anyone can just attach their m3u file that WORKS on the Android phone, then I'd be grateful. Thanks!
I will upload a few sample m3u files when I get onto a computer.
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I linked you how to get MediaMonkey working perfectly for sync...
I use MediaMonkey. I have 40K+ songs to choose from to sync to a 32GB card, so I select a few playlists of select songs to fill it up. Auto-syncs every time I plug the MicroSD card into the computer (I hate having to shut the phone off, but I found syncing to be faster when the card is directly plugged in versus plugging the phone in).
No problems here. Syncing is fast and never have any issues.
I use iSyncr. Support for iTunes Smart playlist is a must for how I manage a series of ever changing playlists. Because it also maintains the correct smart playlist order (something that Apple messed up with iTunes 10.5/iOS5 on my iPod Touch) it syncs music better than iTunes does for my iPod.
Well I finally got this working. I found out that simply RIGHT clicking on a playlist, and telling it to sync to the mounted I777 will sync the music in that playlist, but NOT the actual playlist. Pretty crappy design in my opinion.
I figured it out last night. In Media Monkey, go to your device you want to sync. In the AUTO-SYNC tab, click on the playlists in the left pane of the device window. Then choose the playlists you want to auto-sync. Then go to the OPTIONS tab in that same device window, and tell it to "Create Playlists for:" and choose "Synced Playlists" (I'm not in front of MM now, but it's something like that option). Then tell it to use relative paths, and to swap the "\" for the "/". Done and done. PITA.
CNLiberal said:
Well I finally got this working. I found out that simply RIGHT clicking on a playlist, and telling it to sync to the mounted I777 will sync the music in that playlist, but NOT the actual playlist. Pretty crappy design in my opinion.
I figured it out last night. In Media Monkey, go to your device you want to sync. In the AUTO-SYNC tab, click on the playlists in the left pane of the device window. Then choose the playlists you want to auto-sync. Then go to the OPTIONS tab in that same device window, and tell it to "Create Playlists for:" and choose "Synced Playlists" (I'm not in front of MM now, but it's something like that option). Then tell it to use relative paths, and to swap the "\" for the "/". Done and done. PITA.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
I don't know why you chose to ignore my post with the MediaMonkey configuration that had all of that work done...
MaxRabbit said:
I don't know why you chose to ignore my post with the MediaMonkey configuration that had all of that work done...
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
I left work early, and didn't see it. Sorry. I really appreciate you posting it though!
CNLiberal said:
I left work early, and didn't see it. Sorry. I really appreciate you posting it though!
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
Okay. Welcome!
CNLiberal said:
I also received a message from AT&T telling me I was in the top 5% of users this month. I find that completely unbelievable. I only stream music for ~20 minutes a day. Be it from home via Subsonic, or Google Music. So having it local helps. Not to mention the GF is on my plan now, but we only gave her 2GBs. That will just be eaten up by Google Music.
But the biggest issue is I want the music on my phone because when I hit the fitness room in the basement of my office, I get 0 WLAN bars and 0 3G bars. So I need local music. GF also has the issue of signal strength where she goes.
Does anyone have a playlist.m3u file I could look at to see the proper format of the file? Also, is there anyone else like me out there that actually puts music on their phones now?
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
Google Music's online streaming uses A LOT of data. Even for 20 minutes worth. GM single handedly made me go over my data. They need to fix that. The only way around it is making songs available offline.
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Music streaming from google music is the same as everything else. A song is roughly 6mb, 20 minutes would be around 30mb downloaded. It does take an extreme about of data usage and other then uploading lower quality songs not much will change it. Make sure you don't have "download high quality"option in settings checked.
You can also pin songs to keep them usable offline.
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Decent "Media Go" alternative (better syncing)

Hi fellas,
I found a decent alternative to Media Go, which seems to have some flaws.
getsongbird.com/ (can't post links yet)
It's called "Songbird", and has both Windows and Mac apps, but also one for Android that contains a decent widget to place on your home screen. Seems to sync way better than the standard Media Go.
For those who are interested, here's a bit of a background story to it.
Just wanted to share what I've been messing around with today. Media Go is supposed to be what iTunes is to iPod/iPhone: a decent mediaplayer as well as a sync tool to sync your music and vids to your Xperia S and such.
Now I have a bit of an OCD when it comes to my iTunes library: everything needs to be perfectly organized with with correct mp3 tags and album art. So all the songs in my iTunes are as correct as it gets. But today, I wanted to sync my iTunes library to my Xperia S using Media Go. I was glad to see that they had incorporated "sync your iTunes library", so I did that and it added all my music. Looked pretty good, all the album art was still there and so on.
So I synced my music to the phone, only to find out that for some reason I still haven't been able to identify, it messed up quite a lot of songs. All of a sudden, I had 350 songs from "unknown artists" and stuff like that. Not good. Tried to find the source of these mistakes, fixed some tags here and there but on the phone, it stayed like that.
I then decided to try a third-party app called Songbird. It has a Windows app as well as a droid one and a widget, and I tried adding my iTunes library. Seemed to do the job, so I synced it to my phone and bam, no more unknown artists and a perfectly sorted music library on my phone. It's perfectly organized in the standard music player, but also in the Songbird droid app and the widgets both work like a charm.
So here's my tip for all you guys who also would like to have a perfect music library on their devices: use Songbird if Media Go ****s up.
Hope this helped some people.
Never heard of that app but really anything beats Media Go no?
I've been using an app called 'doubleTwist' for a couple of months now and it works perfect as well. You can easily select which iTunes playlist to Sync and all the rest is automatic.
So I can recommend that program to
Hitmax117 said:
Never heard of that app but really anything beats Media Go no?
I've been using an app called 'doubleTwist' for a couple of months now and it works perfect as well. You can easily select which iTunes playlist to Sync and all the rest is automatic.
So I can recommend that program to
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
Doubletwist works really well.
are there any new alternatives foe Media Go?

Streaming music player for Dropbox?

Is there a good player that will stream all my music in a Music folder I created? I can play them but it only lets me pick one song at a time. I would like to just pick them all and put it on shuffle. -thanks
IRBanite said:
Is there a good player that will stream all my music in a Music folder I created? I can play them but it only lets me pick one song at a time. I would like to just pick them all and put it on shuffle. -thanks
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
this is what i am discovering. it's bad enough listening to studio music, but it totally kills the flow of live shows. anyone got a good answer?
beyond that, google music and streaming media player both stop if i steer away from them. ES Media Player is the only one that will allow me to do other things on the phone at the same time. the issue with it, however, is that it doesn't stop if i get a call. i answer and the music keeps playing.
ideas?
There is a player I use called CloudAround. It's in the market and it's great!
you can also try MusicDropNPlay
Bringing this up again to see if there are any new recommendations. I'm downloading CloudAround now and will report back.
How do you like CloudAround?
IRBanite said:
Bringing this up again to see if there are any new recommendations. I'm downloading CloudAround now and will report back.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
Let us know what you think of CloudAround. We are running in the fast lane with it and have some large features coming this month. We are adding selective sync (no more syncing your 100GB of data for just 5GB of music), folder views (for songs you don't have tagged or weren't recognized), and m4a support (pending Jan launch).
We're always open to suggestions as well.
Have a great day

Amazon mp3 or google music?

I still have not made any music purchases and I was wondering wich one do you guys use the most. Also if I buy music through my phone can I transfer that file to my pc?
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I've only used amazon mp3 but I'm very happy with it. I'm sure you'd be able to dig the mp3 out of your phone if you actually load it on the phone (as opposed to streaming) but it's easy to go to the amazon mp3 website and grab it.
I mostly use Google music but if they don't have something I'll get it from Amazon.
Same here use Google Music since my OG, and I haven't looked back. You can upload up to 22,000 of your own songs, download purchased and free music to your computer, and Google tends to have lots of free music available if you use your computer browser.
The only downside to me is that Google Music isn't a physical music program on your computer, just the Music Manager program that uploads and downloads songs. Besides this though, I love how simple it is after you first try it.
Just my two cents.
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I use Amazon, I like the fact that I choose when and how to put them in the cloud...
Thanks guys
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I have been trying everything to see what I like best. My Epic just killed the battery using any music apps, so I never used it for that.
My Google music uploads got "stuck" after about 3500 songs and I have never been able to get it past that, so I've been trying Pandora and Tunein radio.
Amazon seems to have a lot of free mp3 credits you can get if you follow them on twitter and facebook. They also have the $5 album deals all the time. So, for purchasing music I think it's better. However, if you already have a large existing library, Amazon only gives you 5gb free, but Google gives you a ton of free space with 20,000 songs. If there was a simple way to quickly push your Amazon mp3 purchases to Google music, that would be a great option.
I use Google Music on my phone. I prefer the interface to Amazon MP3 (though I haven't tried it for a while). As far as purchasing music goes, I normally buy from Amazon (where I do most of my shopping) unless Google has a deal. I usually buy on my computer, download to my computer, upload to iTunes (I don't like iTunes but Windows Media Player didn't sync with Google Music correctly when file formats weren't perfect), and then Google Music Manager syncs my music to the cloud. I do often get free music off of Google Music and it automatically gets added to Google Music and I can download it to my PC if I want. It's not perfect, but it's smoother than it sounds (and it wouldn't be so bad if I'd just buy my music from Google and didn't care about storing locally). I'm not sure about the Amazon MP3 app, but Google Music lets users store music locally. I plan on storing all of my music directly on my phone when I get the new Evo and have 64GB+ of space.
I prefer Amazon as my buying choice because the pc program "Amazon Downloader" when run detects all of your latest purchases, automatically downloads to your preferred music folder AND add to your Itunes library.
Plus unlimited space once you buy an album, don't know how long that will last but I have over 100gb up on the cloud. Love it.
As noted... Amazon does give out free mp3 codes fairly often, so I tend to use them more.
megabiteg said:
I use Amazon, I like the fact that I choose when and how to put them in the cloud...
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
This. Google makes downloading your own music a royal pain, especially for individual songs. Amazon is much better at this. And generally, amazon is cheaper too

An Alternate Cloud Music Player

I am not sure where to post this question. This seemed like the best place.
I was wondering if there are any cloud music services for Android that are not Amazon Cloud Player or Google Play Music. Both of them disappoint me in some way. I use to use Amazon but since they switched to a service closer to Apple's, I am just turned off of using it. I do not like being limited to only uploading 250 songs to my player. I do not need the matching service at all. My mp3 files are fine as is and I feel that automatic uploads are overrated. I do not mind waiting a few minutes to upload my own files and really Amazon is not letting me do this anymore, as far as I know.
Google Play Music has never really clicked with me. I love how the playlist sync but I do not like how it mixes the pool of online and offline songs. It also seems to be too combersome for me to specifically tell it, I want my entire library on my device and get it to automatically download all of my music. Using Play Music is a lot like using an iOS device, so simple that I feel like I have lost some functionality. I could just be using it wrong but it just is not clicking even as I have been forced back into using it.
I want a cloud music service that allows me to set up playlist that I can accesses on both of my computer, android tablet, and android phone. I also want it to allow me to automatically download new music that I put up there on my computer onto my tablet and phone. Making it clear what is on the cloud and on my device is handy also. Besides these two programs, are there any others that do this or am I just not seeing Amazon or Google to their fullest potential.
Thanks.

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