Understanding file/music storage on Android phone

November 20, 2019 12:10 PM

I dragged a bunch of mp3s from an external drive to the Music folder on my Note 8 using Google Files app. However, no music app, including Google Play Music, sees them. I see no other appropriate folder to drag them into. What am I not understanding?
posted by dobbs to Technology (7 answers total)

Best answer: Google Play Music is its own weird clunky ecosystem. There is a Music Manager you can set to watch a folder on your desktop and it will upload files in that folder to your Google Play Library, which you can then download back to your Android device. THEN, once you've done that, the files appear in a buried folder renamed to a string of numbers and stripped of any ID3 tags; playable, but unidentifiable outside of the Play Music app.

Have you tried using VLC to play the files?

Or browsing the Music folder with something like Ghost Commander to confirm they are actually there? I was frustrated to learn that even if you set files to be available offline in Google Drive or Dropbox, they don't actually exist on the mobile device outside the apps in the way they do on the desktop versions of the same apps.
posted by clockwork at 12:46 PM on November 20, 2019 [2 favorites]

I always have to restart my device to get new music files to show up. And then you have to fight Google Play to just view your music files instead of streaming, which they obviously want you to do.

For VLC, you have to click on the play all... button to get it to play the next track - really terrible design, so i go back and forth on Android on which music player is the least terrible.
posted by The_Vegetables at 12:55 PM on November 20, 2019 [2 favorites]

Can you view the files by going into Settings on your phone? On my Motorola, you go into Storage, then pick either internal shared storage or the SD card, whichever is supposed to have your music, then find the music folder. If you can see all the files listed there, you can try tapping one and then choosing Google Play Music or another app to open it with. If all that works but Google Play Music still doesn't show the files, you could try the instructions given for this question on the Google Play Help forum, which solved a similar problem for me.
posted by Redstart at 1:28 PM on November 20, 2019

Response by poster: Thanks. VLC found them all.

They are on my phone (not SD card or cloud) in the folder that already existed called Music. Not sure why Play Music can't find them or how to direct it to find them or where I should move them to so it can find them, but for now I guess VLC will be fine.
posted by dobbs at 1:53 PM on November 20, 2019 [1 favorite]

If you just want a more MP3 player like thing... I settled on Pulsar Music Player. And AirDroid for things like moving music/videos/pictures back and forth.
posted by zengargoyle at 4:22 PM on November 20, 2019

It seems that Play Music has no mechanism for browsing local folders any more. That's lame. You can still make it play audio files from some other file browser, but I don't know of a way to make it play a whole folder or a list of files or anything, so VLC or some other media player may be your best option.
posted by wierdo at 5:35 PM on November 20, 2019

Check that there is not a file called ".nomedia" in the folder. This will cause Android to not look for media files in the directory.
posted by dobi at 2:49 PM on November 22, 2019