Play Music save to external storage - can't play offline?

Kidd_Funkadelic · Feb 24, 2014

So I was excited like many others a few months back when Google Play Music was updated to support external (SD) storage. However I don't know if it is actually being used? I'm hoping someone can tell me more or if they see the same behavior.

If you look at app data for play music, it APPEARS to be saving music - I currently show over 700MB of data for the app. However if I open the app and select "On Device" instead of "All Music", I there is never anything listed (In Listen Now, My Library, etc).

So it appears to me that songs are cached but never used for anything, meaning I'm re-streaming every time I listen to something. It definitely appears that way when I re-listen to playlists.

Anyone else notice this?

Kidd_Funkadelic · Feb 24, 2014

Digging around the filesystem a little I see a few interesting things to note:

At the root level I see: "sdcard -> legacy"
Looking here: /sdcard/Android/data/com.google.android.music is only 36 bytes in size.

At root I see: "extSdCard -> sdcard1"
Looking here: /extSdCard/Android/data/com.google.android.music" is 234 MB in size.

Also interesting, the remaining data of the app reported ~700 seems to be in local storage as album artwork, as it's almost all in:
/data/data/com.google.android.music/artwork

I'm on CM11 Nightly if it's relevant.

Thoughts?

hexitnow · Feb 24, 2014

Play music caches the music while you listen to it that's why you're seeing all that data. There's an option in music to clear the cache and there's an option for downloading music for when your offline.

Hit thanks if I helped you out. Doing a little bit of reading goes a long way. Sent via tapatalk.

Kidd_Funkadelic · Feb 24, 2014

hexitnow said:
Play music caches the music while you listen to it that's why you're seeing all that data. There's an option in music to clear the cache and there's an option for downloading music for when your offline.

Hit thanks if I helped you out. Doing a little bit of reading goes a long way. Sent via tapatalk.

Right, but after you have listened to a song and it is cached, it should then appear if you switch from "all music" to "on device". That doesn't happen.

As a different test I just pinned a play list. It took 5 minutes to download everything. If I select something else in the app, then come back to that playlist with "on device" selected, even though it still shows as pinned, it says "0 songs on device".

Kidd_Funkadelic · Feb 25, 2014

Just to close the loop on this:

I changed GM back to internal storage,
Renamed /extSdCard/Android/data/com.google.android.music to /extSdCard/Android/data/com.google.android.music_orig.
Tried to change GM back to external, and got a FC
At that point the option to switch was greyed out
I rebooted the phone, was able to switch to external and now it works like it's supposed to again.

So something about the external storage location must have been corrupted. I think it may stem from using the Music2SD Xposed module before GM was updated to support external.

Anyway, all fixed!

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Play Music save to external storage - can't play offline?

Kidd_Funkadelic

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