Music and the best way to handle it. - T-Mobile Samsung Galaxy S II SGH-T989

Greetings. Im hoping someone might be able to help me with a very annoying problem im having.
I have somewhere around 2000 music tracks, all of which are uploaded to Google Music. Ive had GMusic since they first announced the beta and i love the fact that my entire library is everywhere I go. I also love that i can download the tracks directly on my phone, from my phone.
However using the app to play music is horrible. In the past i used poweramp, which is a wonderful player. My main problem with Google Music is it audibly cuts the power from the headphone jack in between tracks, so when i have it hooked up to my car stereo i hear a pop when the track changes... which annoys me to utter hell. On top of that it behaves weirdly some times, for example i had it set to shuffle all the other day, and it would stop on every song, and i would have to hit play manually to go to the next song.
What i would like to do is go back to using PowerAmp, but be able to manage my music as easily as i do with GMusic. Problem is that, PowerAmp doesnt see the music i download from the GMusic app and the one time it did, all the meta-data wasnt there. So all poweramp said was "Unknown track 1".
The other side of the problem is managing it on my computer. Since i bought music from Itunes and Google Music, keeping everything organized has become a nightmare(i have a number of compilations, and when you download the music from google music, it organizes it by artist not by the album). Which is why i dont want to have to manually move files to my phone. Ive tried WinAmp and Double Twist, and both have their annoyances. I was wondering what other people do, maybe someone can make my life easier.

subsonic, streams from your PC, no need to upload it to the cloud and it the UI is not bad either. it can also cache your streams for offline play

Related

[Q] Is it Defy or all android that suck at playing media?

I've been trying for days to get the defy to work i want.
I listen to audiobooks, music and podcasts, and I need to be able to control it from the headset
I tried default player, google listen, winamp, doggcatcher. And cant get the thing to work right!!
Music+ doesn't even register the button press, listen resumes and skips to next track, even if you're playing another audio in the background. Winamp on its own is fine but does not download podcasts, and doggcatcher has conflicts with winamp on the headset thing.
Has anyone find a good solution for this? it seems just the way android is built, and the lack of a good unified media player (with or integrated with podcast manager).
Such a disappointment... I was so looking for having an android phone! If I can't find a solution, it seems its not for someone like me untill they integrate things a little more tightly.
Well, it's not the Defy. And while I don't think that Android sucks at playing media I do agree with some of your points. I also listen to audio books and podcast. For the moment I'm using AudioBook Player 2 for audiobooks. It's not prefect by a long shot but it does the job. As for podcast I haven't found anything useful yet. The defaut player is suppose to play podcast but there is no way to skip through. If I have to stop listening to the podcast there is no way of getting back to were I left off. And while the device obviously play videos, and does so quite well, I haven't found any type of video player interface. The only way I can start a video is by going into the gallery and taping on the file I want to play. That dosen't seem right to me.
So yeah, I feel your frustration.
JamesDax said:
Well, it's not the Defy. And while I don't think that Android sucks at playing media I do agree with some of your points.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
Yes, sorry. I did not meant to bash, its just that I soo wanted to love it... and I don't, and if there is no good solution I think android is not for my for now. I don't know. It has so many great things!
Thanks for your suggestions I'll look into it.
On another subject : When I listen to music, I can't do anything else (switching to landscape mode e.g.), otherwise it's really slow.
Is anybody else having that bug ? Some guy here mentioned it. But he then said he fixed it without having it deodexed. How do you fix this ?
Meridian is a media player that does most of what you want, with the possible exceptin of podcasting (don´t use it, don´t know).
It remembers where you last listened to a track, and if you switch to video (which has a library of it´s own) it still remembers where in the audio track you were when you go back to that. So actually better than WMP there... ;-)
Only thing that grinds my gears with this is an annoying bug that starts a random track when I press the button on any wired headset. If I hang up a call, or if I want to pause and then start playing in Spotify or radio, Meridian starts playing a tune in the background. I thought it was a bug I was having with my Pulse, but it´s there with the Defy as well.
A BT headset has none of these issues though.
Don't worry google is working on a multimedia improvement......soooonnnn soon, also has anyone tried poweramp

[Q] Bluetooth streaming

Hi guys, I did a search and I can't find anything on this, if it's already been answered I do apologize. I've got a kenwood stereo in my car that connects to the phone and streams music over bluetooth. I've used this on my last 2 phones (Samsung Epic, and HTC EVO) with no problems. Now with the Galaxy SII, i can't stream music. It will connect and do voice calls no problem, but when i try to play music, it just skips through every song on the list and then freezes. The only time it worked was the first time I connected it to my stereo. Has anyone else had this problem? Since I use Google Music, all of my music is streamed and I have to do it through bluetooth, this has become quite a pain!
i'm on a clarion CZ 509 no problem streaming from my phone to the car
it does it automatically as soon as the car is in the phone range
which some times is kinda annoying, when you don't want it to auto stream
Yeah, mine will connect automatically and phone calls and dialing work with no issues. It's just streaming music. I'm going to try and delete my phone from the deck and re-connect it, hopefully that works. I'm trying to avoid having to replace my phone or do a hard reset.
my deck can save up to 5 phones pairing
so i just assigned a new profile to the SGS2 when i got it
the other ones registered are my old I9000, XT720 and Nexus S
there is another trick you can use
in the phone in the BT profile after pairing, hold the profile for 2 sec, it will pop up a sub menu, in which you can choose both option or only 1 of them
in which case it's BT audio, or BT phone
so play around with that and see
another thing which i don't know if your deck allows you to do is to Pair the phone as a Media device, or Phone device
so in my deck can can pair the phone to be only as a phone device, or only as a media device, or both
I tried messing around with those options, however it either disconnects the phone completely (unchecking the phone box) or just plays the music through the phone (unchecking the media box). I tried streaming another song through the stock music app, and that worked, so I think it may be google music itself. I had downloaded the ICS version, so now i'm trying to downgrade back to current. I'll have to check to see if works later, as now it won't connect to my account to grab all of my music. Thanks for the replies though, I'll keep this updated incase anyone else has the same issues.
now that you mention it, that might be it
the DRM license thing kicking in
i just found that was causing some random crash on my phone as well, removed music 4.0 and installed another music player, now everything is back to normal
i use jukefox to play music, it automatically creates everything that is necessary, like albums, auto get the missing album covers, etc, etc...
1 button does it all
then you just pick or randomly choose what you want to hear, easy music browsing for when you are driving
Yeah it's definitely a google music issue on my phone. The stock player works fine, but that doesn't help me, I keep all of my music uploaded to the google cloud, and have no way to access it right now. Even with the regular current apk I am having issues. I'll have to wait and see if they can update it for this drm issue I think. For now I'll just use the current stock player and fill up my sd card and play off of that
that's what i do
i play it off my SD card
get a 32 GB or 64 GB and you'll have plenty of space to load all your favourite albums
i keep several copies of 32 GB for different albums / movies
So just a followup to this, I did a hard reset today on my phone and it still doesn't help. Turns out, it only does this when connected through bluetooth, and it's a song that's been "made available offline". If i'm actually streaming a song, there are no issues, but any of my playlists or albums that are saved won't play through bluetooth (they will play normally however). Hopefully this can be fixed in an update through Google Music.
So, i've had this issue as well and it appears to be something to do with "shuffle".
At first I disconnected bluetooth and then started playing the music on my phone and made sure to turn ON shuffle..I then turned bluetooth back on in my radio and once it connected...all was well. I didn't like this solution and decided I needed to find an alternative.
I then downloaded the MIUI music app (which has always been my favorite) and the music streaming is working normally now
Was this an issue that you experienced with the google music beta app, or just the standard music player that came with the phone? Mine has only had issues on the music beta app, and it didn't matter if i had shuffle on or not. I've been using the standard music app that came installed on the phone and have had no issues since. On another note, does anyone know if you can see album art through bluetooth? I'm able to get song , artist, and album info, but I've never seen album art come through yet. I'm not sure if this is something bluetooth can handle or not.
Stock app. I just installed music beta and it seems to work fine like miui music
Sent from my SGH-T989 using XDA App
I take that back, music "beta" just did it to me too. Back to miui
Sent from my SGH-T989 using XDA App

Ghost Music Player

Ok, this was just damn strange - So my Nexus was in my pocket and I take it out. Out of no where, songs start playing that I have in my library without me having pressed any buttons. My first thought was maybe I accidentally hit a button and no big deal. So I open my current apps and see that the google music player wasn't even on. I launched the actual google music app to then stop the song from there and couldn't locate the "Now Playing" song either! So I was left with no other choice but to restart the phone!
Anyone else experience this one?
How odd. Do you have any other music/media players? Even possibly a file manager? Maybe there's a bug with one of them.
Sent from my Galaxy Nexus using Tapatalk
I have a very similar issue, but it occurs most often when I automatically connect to Bluetooth in my car. I use Spotify so it clashes with Google Music too and causes this scramble of both players playing music on top of each other.
But I am very curious about this too, although it pops up primarily on my bluetooth. Google Music will just begin playing songs and further more I don't ever use it or initiate it. After a while I will get an error saying "Music has unexpectedly stopped working".
I've also closed the app as much as possible in Settings>Apps so I don't understand why it keeps playing and showing up repeatedly.
I had this issue with the Google music player also, I use power amp pro as my main music player and one day music started to play, I checked power amp pro and nothing so then I checked Google music and that was the problem. I disabled Google music. Also Google music app was force closing on me ever few days don't know why.
Sent from my Galaxy Nexus using xda premium

Google Music on Bluetooth in car

Whenever I get in my car and my bluetooth connects, google play music just starts playing whatever was last on on Google Music App. I'm a spotify user and would like to change the default from Google to Spotify. I can't seem to find a way to stop Google music from playing by default. It's very annoying. Works great if you use Google music, but otherwise, annoying.
Anyone having this issue? Anyone have a fix?
AFAIK there isn't a way to prevent media autoplay when connecting to (certain?) car stereos.
Interestingly enough, I don't think that the behavior is actually specific to GPM. I usually listen to podcasts in the car rather than music, and as long as the phone hasn't rebooted or GPM hasn't been used since Pocket Casts was playing, my podcast resumes when I get back in the car usually even if the notification has been closed. It may be the the Spotify app is missing some hook that allows it to take advantage of this feature, but I don't believe we have any way of affecting it directly.
BRO. This **** happened to me for like a week straight and I was getting pretty angry. I made the mistake of asking Google Assistant to play a song for me ONCE and every time I connected to a bluetooth device (usually my car) it started playing the song from where it left off. I don't know what I did to make it stop to be honest, so I'm not much of a help but I can confirm this is a very annoying issue.
I did NOT, however, uninstall Google Music, Disable it, or touch the app in any capacity. There's no option to prevent it from autoplaying, either. I might've let the song play out, but I'm afraid to open the app again to take a look.

Chromecast Audio Review from a Squeezebox User

As title says, this is going to be a Chromecast Audio review from the point of view of a Squeezebox user. As such, it will mostly be comparing CCA and Squeezebox. I'm also hoping some other CCA users see this and might be able to chime in on some of the shortcomings I'm having with CCA.
Overall, I'm liking CCA better than Squeezebox. CCA sync is dead on, and I have 6 rooms going. My squeezebox setup was a mix of PC and android devices running various squeezebox player software, and the sync would always be off for the first few seconds of a song. Occasionally, audio would get out of sync and starting and stopping playback was necessary. I listen to a lot of podcasts, some of which I pay for, and Squeezebox doesn't support HTTPS for podcasts. CCA is so easy to use for podcasts, it's increased my already high amount of podcast listening by quite a bit. Another benefit of CCA and podcasts, since I'm using the same app I listen to podcasts with on my phone, playback is synced. I used to listen to part of a podcast in the car on the way home from work, then have to scrub through podcast on squeezebox to find the spot I was at. Not the largest inconvenience in the world, but it's nice that I don't have to do it any more.
Now on to the shortcomings of CCA. Two things that worked with Squeezebox that are important features to me were mixing local files with tracks from Spotify and Last.fm Scrobbling. I have a large music library and quite a bit of it isn't available on most streaming services. Google Music let's you upload your local library and stream it, so I'm trying to match the Spotify/Local file functionality this way. So far, it's working pretty well, but that leads to the scrobbling issues. If I play music from my phone, the app seems to time out and stop live tracking what is playing, thus the scrobbling app I have also starts to miss playing tracks. This happens even when the phone is plugged in to charge. As a work around, I'll play music from my PC using Google Play music on chrome with a chrome extension to scrobble. This works great, except now the only thing I can control with my phone is play/pause and volume. If I want to add tracks to playlist, change songs, etc, gotta walk over to the PC. With squeezebox, I could control the music with any device, and switch between devices doing the controlling with no issue.
There are programs, like Kodi and Emby, that have the ability to cast music. I'm pretty sure they also have plugins for Last.fm. So they would seem to solve scrobbling and controlling with multiple devices. I'm not 100% clear on whether they can play local files as well as tracks from Spotify or Google Music (or any other streaming service for that matter) on the same playlist. I think my next project is going to be setting up Kodi or Emby and seeing if I can get the functionality I want.
Another minor thing about CCA I'm not liking is that you can't control volumes until after playback is started. If I'm playing music in the evening before heading out with friends, I'll turn the volume up. Then in the morning, if I want to play something to get me moving, I have to hit play and then pause as fast as possible so my eardrums aren't blown out. I'm going to have to start teaching myself to turn down the volume when I stop playing music...
I have my personal music library on a NAS and play it all through BubbleUPnP App on a range of android devices. Best option I have found for anybody in the family being able to control all the music collection from any device.
I'm trying to match the Spotify o download music from insta-downloader.online l file functionality this way. So far, it's working pretty well, but that leads to the scrobbling issues. If I play music from my phone and I heard very nice in my app the music
Yeah this is App https://insta-downloader.online/ on a range of android devices, In my opinion is very nice

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