I keep a fair bit of music loaded onto my phone, specifically so that I can plug in headphones when I’m on my lunch break at work. I didn’t used to use headphones in the break room, but I have several co-workers who not only seem to enjoy loud and annoying TV shows (why is pranking people on TV such a big thing? And even if I didn’t mind that the hosts have especially annoying laughs), but who’ll walk into the break room and turn up the volume on the TV, and then hold loud and obnoxious conversations over the top of the TV. So, noise canceling headphones for the win!
With my newest phone I was just using Google Music. It came preinstalled, and since I don’t need anything fancy, or anything streaming, I didn’t care about any other features. The last couple weeks its been prompting me to “upload your music to Youtube for streaming anywhere!”, which I ignored. I don’t want streaming, I don’t want to use signal, I want to play the music already on the damn phone.
Yesterday I plugged in my headphones, tapped the music player, and got a message “Google Music is no longer available for streaming services, upload your music to Youtube to continue!”. And wouldn’t let me just play the music on my phone.
So I’m sitting there swearing at my phone (to the shock and amusement of my coworkers who are regularly shocked at the language that I know, why I don’t know), and scrolling through the Google Play Store trying to find a music player that didn’t cost anything, didn’t have ads, and just played MY MUSIC ALREADY ON MY PHONE DAMYOU. After thinking about it a minute longer, I disabled the Google Music app, and then went into the file manager, found my music, and tapped…..and it played! No special app required! Woot! No ads, no annoying “upload your music for streaming!!”, nothing! Just played.
So, lesson learned. If you have a reasonably recent model Android phone (and possibly older ones too, since I don’t have the newest and fanciest) you may not need a special app to play music!