Music storage

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blade12

Limp Gawd
Joined
Dec 29, 2005
Messages
346
Hello, I was looking for music storage.

So here's the issue. I have over 5gigs of songs. Galaxy s6 unfortunately lacks a SD-card slot so I'm limited in internal hd space as it is. I regret buying galaxy s6 due to lack of sd-card, but it is 2yrs too late lol.

I got sick of listening to ads on spotify so I currently use Amazon music included with Prime, but I can only host up to 250 of my own songs, which is simply not enough. Another problem with Amazon music is they add/remove albums often, which drives me insane. I find small chunks of my music accessible one month and not the next - there is Amazon music unlimited but is too expensive on top of prime. I think they tease you and then trick you into either upgrading account or buying the song as a marketing ploy.

Is there any decent alternative to spotify and amazon music? I would love music cloud where I can host my own music and listen without ads, but I don't see such an option out there. I could download mp3s and upload entire playlist to my phone, but that would eat up 5gigs on my phone (remember, no sd-card on galaxy s6).

So... my options are a) cloud storage and listening directly that way, b) local storage but a way other than SD-card, c) another option I haven't thought of yet..

I do see a wireless flash drive.. https://www.amazon.com/SanDisk-Wireless-Smartphones-Computers-SDWS4-032G-G46/dp/B00ZCFYT5K .. Dunno how well it works with very average reviews.. Also traditional usb stick https://www.amazon.com/SanDisk-32GBUltra-Drive-SDDD2-032G-GAM46-Black/dp/B01CVOLBPK
 
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Google Play Music lets you upload your own music (MP3 is their preferred format, if you upload anything else they will convert to either 160 Kbps LAME encoded MP3 files for low bitrate content and 320 Kbps LAME encoded MP3 files for higher bitrate stuff like FLAC files, etc) and they now allow for up to 100,000 files/songs so, if you're into your own music and you don't have space for a huge chunk of it on your device because of space limitations, well, Google Play Music is pretty much the solution.

Personally instead of wasting the bandwidth on uploading FLAC files I would say transcode them to LAME MP3 files yourself first then upload them, that is if you use FLAC files at all. If you have a lot of tunes already in MP3 format then go for it and toss 'em up on Google Play Music - it does require a Google account of course but I mean really, what freak out there that's so paranoid about privacy and security doesn't have such an account when Google knows everything about everyone already anyway? :D

If you use Chrome on your desktop/laptop PC, you can log into Play Music, choose your Library, then drag and drop the music files from your computer onto the browser window and it'll upload - I did that recently with about 17,000 songs of my own collection (from 2300+ CDs I own collected since the mid-1980s) and did it in small batches of a few hundred at a time dropped on the browser, no issues at all and I was done in less than 12 hours and it wasn't a constant upload 'cause I took breaks from time to time doing other things and just forgetting that I had to add more songs.

Works fine for me, costs me nothing at all, I can listen to MY MUSIC whenever and wherever I damned well please and it's using maybe a few hundred megs at most (for caching songs but they get deleted and replaced by new songs as you continue listening, it doesn't just keep storing every song on your device permanently). Adjustable streaming rates from "Good" which seems to be the 160 Kbps bitrate to "High Quality" which means the full 320 Kbps originals are sent down the pipe to your device.

Since I have T-Mobile and their Music Freedom service is included in my service I can stream MY MUSIC from Play Music to my device(s) and it never counts against my 5GB data (capped then throttled at 5GB) as much as I want. I probably listened to about oh, 7.5GB of data last month just letting it play in the background whenever I was awake basically. I think AT&T and Sprint are now doing something similar, maybe Verizon too at some point, but T-Mobile started that "unlimited music streaming" thing so I damned sure take advantage of it myself.

It works for me and many many other people, works on iOS devices and obviously Android so, if you need someplace to stash your music and not waste space on your device, Play Music is more than likely the best solution out there.

As for ads, never seen any using the Play Music app from Google, it's a basic player that gets the job done so it's useful and no it doesn't spam you with ads, least not in my experience.

A word of note however: Play Music will overwrite the tags on the files you upload and fill them with the info it has for the songs based on the Gracenote database. It still gives you the most relevant info (track name, artist, album, dates, genre, etc) but if you pride yourself on having good tags on your audio files, Play Music will wipe those tags right the fuck out so, make sure you don't delete your original files locally wherever you store them if that's important to you. They add artwork as well that replaces whatever you might have in the folders or embedded in the actual music files themselves (I do both myself, embed and add a cover.jpg to every folder of tunes).

Good luck.
 
blade12 said:
Tiberian

I will try that. Does Google Play Music cost money?
Click to expand...

It is free, but has a premium service for $10/month that lets you listen to any song/album/artist with unlimited skips and you can also save music locally for offline playback if needed. Otherwise it's just like free Pandora and has radio stations with ads (I think). They also have a $15/month family plan that that I split with a friend (for $5/month) where you can have up to 5 devices on the account that get the premium service.

But I'll echo what Tiberian says and say Play Music is exactly what you're looking for. I've uploaded all of my CD albums to my account on it and it works perfectly.
 
Yes, the ability to upload up to 100,000 of your own files/songs is free, Google's massive storage network laughs at 100K songs really. :) The premium service that T4rd mentioned above is completely optional and doesn't have anything to do with uploading your own tunes, it just allows you to listen to basically anything Google Play Music typically sells on a song-by-song or by-album purchase price and even to download some of them as mentioned.

Aside from Google fucking up my carefully prepped hand-done tags on all the songs I upload and wrecking the nice consistent album art I embed in the files (always 600x600 images and the best quality versions I can track down myself) I have no issues with Play Music and using it for my own music stash, you could say. Been using that aspect of Play Music since Google first introduced the ability to upload my own files and I still use it.

Now if they'd only support Opus (for uploading purposes) and not transcode the fucking files to MP3 I'd be ok, but I'll live. :D
 
I can vouch for Google Play Music. I've been using it for years to host my music, and it works great. I've never had an issue with it, but your mileage may vary of course.
 
I use Amazon Music for this. But I'm also an Amazon Prime member so I got that included extra storage. But Google Play Music has a higher bitrate. It's just that I already have my collection on Amazon for a while, and Google Play Music got there later. I don't want to have to re-upload or resync my existing music collection.
 
CHANG3D said:
I use Amazon Music for this. But I'm also an Amazon Prime member so I got that included extra storage. But Google Play Music has a higher bitrate. It's just that I already have my collection on Amazon for a while, and Google Play Music got there later. I don't want to have to re-upload or resync my existing music collection.
Click to expand...

I'm in the process of getting my music collection from Amazon prime into mp3. It is very difficult to do it from amazon music because you can't copy/paste song titles directly from program or web app. You have to right click, inspect and copy/paste title from inspect into text file manually. Then ofc, I have to search for mp3 of it to download. Now imagine doing that over 900 times (600 technically as I already have 300 of my songs backed up).. I have no choice but to do 1 alphabetical letter a day without killing my hands/fingers lol. It's very difficult.
 
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