Develop Bugs

[Q] Zune replacement?

My zune is on its way out with the audio jack starting to give me problems. seeing as i dont have the skills to repair it myself I was hoping to use a family members upgrade who doesn't want a new phone to grab this phone. From a quick play through with it the device feels pretty close to the zune music player. Can anyone tell me more about it as a media player? Also if i were to leave it in airplane mode what could i expect on battery life.

nobo77 said:
My zune is on its way out with the audio jack starting to give me problems. seeing as i dont have the skills to repair it myself I was hoping to use a family members upgrade who doesn't want a new phone to grab this phone. From a quick play through with it the device feels pretty close to the zune music player. Can anyone tell me more about it as a media player? Also if i were to leave it in airplane mode what could i expect on battery life.
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I have the weak but functional HTC Trophy for work because I wanted to learn Windows Phone 7 but not ready to give up Android. It has the Zune player on it but I can honestly say it is not a replacement. For one, we are limited to 16 Gig storage, so you for sure can sync more music than that. And as far as I know, you cannot make playlists with streaming ZunePass music. Plus, I miss the scrolling text, time, etc information as a song is playing like the ZuneHD does.

garak0410 said:
I have the weak but functional HTC Trophy for work because I wanted to learn Windows Phone 7 but not ready to give up Android. It has the Zune player on it but I can honestly say it is not a replacement. For one, we are limited to 16 Gig storage, so you for sure can sync more music than that. And as far as I know, you cannot make playlists with streaming ZunePass music. Plus, I miss the scrolling text, time, etc information as a song is playing like the ZuneHD does.
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I'm not sure how you're using the phone for music, but when I go to play a song it shows me album art, time lapsed and time remaining as well as the time of day at top-right of the screen.
I have plenty of playlists, some auto and some not, that include zune pass music and they all work just fine.
I had the old Zune 120GB model and while it had more space I don't know anyone who actually needs 600 hours of music with them at all times, the 16GB has suited me just fine I have a ton of my favorite tracks as well as video/audio podcasts that I take to work with me at all times, it's great.

xyexz said:
I'm not sure how you're using the phone for music, but when I go to play a song it shows me album art, time lapsed and time remaining as well as the time of day at top-right of the screen.
I have plenty of playlists, some auto and some not, that include zune pass music and they all work just fine.
I had the old Zune 120GB model and while it had more space I don't know anyone who actually needs 600 hours of music with them at all times, the 16GB has suited me just fine I have a ton of my favorite tracks as well as video/audio podcasts that I take to work with me at all times, it's great.
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I was speaking specifically how it will cycle through picture(s) of a singer/band, with the letters going across the screeen, etc. The Zune player on a Windows Phone will not do that.
How can you make a playlist specifically for ZunePass streaming on the Windows Phone Zune player?
Thanks!
Brian

New offline music on watch killing my battery...

After receiving the new 4.4.W.2 update, I decided to move some songs from Google Play on my phone onto the watch for offline playing.
Here's how it went:
Downloaded an album with 12 tracks onto my phone
Took my watch off off the charger at 100% battery
Began to transfer music to the watch, took 25 an hour to move 12 songs. Only checked the screen maybe 5 times during the transfer
After the transfer was complete, I listened to about 5 min of music
Battery dropped from 100% to 70% in a span of half an hour......
Call me crazy, but this leaves a lot to be desired..

Jbuch84 said:
After receiving the new 4.4.W.2 update, I decided to move some songs from Google Play on my phone onto the watch for offline playing.
Here's how it went:
Downloaded an album with 12 tracks onto my phone
Took my watch off off the charger at 100% battery
Began to transfer music to the watch, took 25 an hour to move 12 songs. Only checked the screen maybe 5 times during the transfer
After the transfer was complete, I listened to about 5 min of music
Battery dropped from 100% to 70% in a span of half an hour......
Call me crazy, but this leaves a lot to be desired..
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I know how to transfer music, but how do you play music from the watch?

ChrisNee1988 said:
I know how to transfer music, but how do you play music from the watch?
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Since the new OTA lets you store music on the watch itself, go into settings and pair the watch with a bluetooth speaker or headphones. I have mine paired with the Moto Hint, when I have the hint in my ear and I play a song on the watch it will stream to the earpiece.

Call me crazy, but I think you are expecting too much from a device that isn't really intended to be a standalone media player.
Putting music on a smartwatch, or a Moto 360 to be specific, is kind of dumb to begin with imho.
Why? First, it's a watch.. Second, it has only 4GB of storage. Third, it has no speakers or audio output jacks. Fourth, ya, it's a watch.
Playing music from a smartphone and controlling via the M360 is more than sufficient and has almost no effect on battery other than regular operations.
My 2 cents.

Jbuch84 said:
After receiving the new 4.4.W.2 update, I decided to move some songs from Google Play on my phone onto the watch for offline playing.
Here's how it went:
Downloaded an album with 12 tracks onto my phone
Took my watch off off the charger at 100% battery
Began to transfer music to the watch, took 25 an hour to move 12 songs. Only checked the screen maybe 5 times during the transfer
After the transfer was complete, I listened to about 5 min of music
Battery dropped from 100% to 70% in a span of half an hour......
Call me crazy, but this leaves a lot to be desired..
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
Test it again taking out the transfer step. I would bet that is what is eating up battery not the actual playing of the music.

how to transfer song to watch?

Andromjb said:
Call me crazy, but I think you are expecting too much from a device that isn't really intended to be a standalone media player.
Putting music on a smartwatch, or a Moto 360 to be specific, is kind of dumb to begin with imho.
Why? First, it's a watch.. Second, it has only 4GB of storage. Third, it has no speakers or audio output jacks. Fourth, ya, it's a watch.
Playing music from a smartphone and controlling via the M360 is more than sufficient and has almost no effect on battery other than regular operations.
My 2 cents.
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That's your opinion, but... if excusing faults based on the fact that "it's just a watch"is sound reasoning, then you're completly abandoning the appeal and leaving many wondering why bother dropping $250 on "just a watch".
Aside from notifications, wasn't this feature one of the main selling points for the device? Personally, I looked forward to being able to leave my clunky phone at home while going on a run. It seems natural that a smartwatch should be able to set me free of cords and allow me to listen to music wirelessly. If the device battery struggles to handle that, I can't imagine how short the life would be if music and GPS ran at the same time.
This turned into a rant.. but I was hopeful that this update might bring purpose to the Moto 360. As it stands now, its a $250 watch that is less useful than my $75 g-shock anytime I move more than 25 ft. away from the smartphone it was meant free our addiction to.

I agree this would be a useful feature. I could see not bringing my phone to the gym and using my watch to listen to music.
I still think this watch is worth every penny I paid for without this feature. Hell, being able to change the watch face daily is a pretty cool feature by itself. Add in the ability to get notifications on a device that looks like a watch I'd wear with a suit, and it's worth the $250.

Jbuch84 said:
That's your opinion, but... if excusing faults based on the fact that "it's just a watch"is sound reasoning, then you're completly abandoning the appeal and leaving many wondering why bother dropping $250 on "just a watch".
Aside from notifications, wasn't this feature one of the main selling points for the device? Personally, I looked forward to being able to leave my clunky phone at home while going on a run. It seems natural that a smartwatch should be able to set me free of cords and allow me to listen to music wirelessly. If the device battery struggles to handle that, I can't imagine how short the life would be if music and GPS ran at the same time.
This turned into a rant.. but I was hopeful that this update might bring purpose to the Moto 360. As it stands now, its a $250 watch that is less useful than my $75 g-shock anytime I move more than 25 ft. away from the smartphone it was meant free our addiction to.
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I never said it was "just" a watch. I was more implying that it's main purpose is not to be a media player specifically.
Being that Android Wear & Google Play Music just implemented this feature in the latest update, I don't believe this was a selling point at the time of M360's sale. Not to mention, the first implementation is most definitely not going to be optimized.
Is it a cool feature? Of course. Is it it useless? Of course not. But that is also dependent on the user.
Seems you just are not happy with the battery life and watch in general from your response.

even if you store music on your watch and leave your phone at home while going on a run or gym... don't u still have to carry a bluetooth speaker to hear the music..lol.. anyways.. resetted watch 4 times.. no luck here...ughhh..

Andromjb said:
I never said it was "just" a watch. I was more implying that it's main purpose is not to be a media player specifically.
Being that Android Wear & Google Play Music just implemented this feature in the latest update, I don't believe this was a selling point at the time of M360's sale. Not to mention, the first implementation is most definitely not going to be optimized.
Is it a cool feature? Of course. Is it it useless? Of course not. But that is also dependent on the user.
Seems you just are not happy with the battery life and watch in general from your response.
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Battery life is great, can last 30 odd hours so long as I only use the watch to check time a handful of times a day.
My post was to see if anyone else is experiencing such problems and if they had any real world uses similar and ways to save battery.

no one should be surprised that using the watch as a media player would kill the battery.
the best use for the media player on the watch is to be used while working out or running. because it will definitely need to be recharged after using it for an hour as a media player.

Is offline music only support google music? ? I still not.figure out how to.download local song to.watch, anyone can clairfy? Thanks.

gammite said:
no one should be surprised that using the watch as a media player would kill the battery.
the best use for the media player on the watch is to be used while working out or running. because it will definitely need to be recharged after using it for an hour as a media player.
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Click to collapse
if you go to the start menu on the watch and select the play music app, it will inform you there is no music stored on the watch and you need to change a setting on your phone to "download to android wear". go into play music on your phone and in the settings is where that option is. As soon as I checked it, the music i had downloaded to my phone started downloading to my watch. once it's done you can access the music from the play music app on your watch. the newest play music version is required i believe.

FlowingAway said:
if you go to the start menu on the watch and select the play music app, it will inform you there is no music stored on the watch and you need to change a setting on your phone to "download to android wear". go into play music on your phone and in the settings is where that option is. As soon as I checked it, the music i had downloaded to my phone started downloading to my watch. once it's done you can access the music from the play music app on your watch. the newest play music version is required i believe.
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Thanks mate. Now i know.
Since i have not played google music before, so does this offline download to.wear only support.song.from google? But not local music? And how I know the download.is.happening? Also can I select which songs be download to 360?

mmx6688 said:
Thanks mate. Now i know.
Since i have not played google music before, so does this offline download to.wear only support.song.from google? But not local music? And how I know the download.is.happening? Also can I select which songs be download to 360?
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From the looks of it, it's only music you've purchased from the play store, or music you've uploaded to play music. local music residing on your phone won't transfer over. you'll definitely know it's happening, a notification appears on the watch that says how many songs are left remaining to download. as far as which songs you're getting, i'm still testing it, but it looks like it's going to be all songs you've downloaded to the phone, but i could be wrong about that.

FlowingAway said:
From the looks of it, its only music youve purchased from the play store, or music youve uploaded to play music. local music residing on your phone wont transfer over. youll definitely know its happening, a notification appears on the watch that says how many songs are left remaining to download. as far as which songs youre getting, im still testing it, but it looks like its going to be all songs youve downloaded to the phone, but i could be wrong about that.
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Thanks. Now I have a full.picture.

Jbuch84 said:
Battery life is great, can last 30 odd hours so long as I only use the watch to check time a handful of times a day.
My post was to see if anyone else is experiencing such problems and if they had any real world uses similar and ways to save battery.
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Click to collapse
Gotcha. Results are pretty sporadic from what I've gathered. There are too many variables right now, such as people using poorly optimized watch faces and/or apps. Possibly running older frimware/software, enabling/disabling ambient screen, brightness settings, etc.
Hard to get a baseline, but my results personally have been pretty great. I can't complain.
I use stock Moto watch faces, most specifically Retrograde (black background). Textra for SMS, it offers a lot of customization (vibration settings, color, etc), and is one of the most fluid in terms of replying via watch. Sometimes I use Mini Launcher, but it tends to drain battery a little more than usual and gets in the way a lot while swiping.
If you aren't using stock faces, then I recommend you stay away from third party watch faces until the Wear update with face customization becomes available.

Not just you. I listened through the watch for 30 minutes and it absolutely smoked my battery.

I wonder how the other watches hold up
Sent from my HTC6525LVW using Tapatalk

Soundcloud issues on HTC M8/Lollipop

Since moving from my HTC One M7 to M8, with the Lollipop update, I've found Souncloud is now completely useless as a music player on the go.
Whilst it used to buffer a song and cache it for future listens, it now attempts a download every single time. Which has two annoying outcomes.
1. If I'm on the move I can barely get 20 seconds into a song before it stops, and struggles to buffer.
2. After listening to a playlist, which I previously listened to on WiFi, I'd expect it to be cached for listening to whilst out of WiFi range, but this month after looking at 'Settings>Data usage' I found that I had used over half a GB (550mb) of data allowance because Soundcloud no longer remembers my tracks.
I'm pretty annoyed by it from a practical standpoint, but I make a lot of use of Souncloud as I'm a musician and share my music on there, however if I have to stream the songs live every single time, it becomes financially unviable. I don't want to use half my monthly data on listening to music. I feel like I've gone back in time.
Anyone else having similar issues?

Literally nobody else?

Unbelievable. I've just heard that Soundcloud have done this deliberately.
The caching on previous versions of the app is not a feature of the current app. It was only available to deliver content quicker to the user and allowing a more streamlined experience. Our mobile engineers have since improved the technical capabilities and therefore limited its capacity.
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Ridiculous move. Sounds like the mobile networks will be the only people to benefit.

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

Odd bluetooth behavior since updatin to android 9

I've been experience a few issues with the new update. One of them, which is more a nuisance than anything, is my bluetooth connection to my car. It's a 2015 Mustang with MyFord Touch. The phone is a galaxy S8+. About 1/3 of the time when I start the car, the phone shows up named a bunch of random characters, instead of Galaxy S8+. Not a huge deal. My music player starts automatically (even if I close it, and kill the process). The thing that's weird is that the audio is kind of hollow sounding when it starts up UNTIL I turn on the phones display, then it kicks into a fuller sound. It's never done this before. Not only that, but it decides when it wants to display track information from Samsung music player only a small portion of the time.
If I'm playing music through Amazon Music, it updates the track information, no problem. If I switch to Samsung's music player, it just displays the last track I played on Amazon music, and never changes. If I start the car with the music player going, it won't update track information until it gets to the next song, and even that is spotty.
Aside from these issues, and the issues I'm having with the default browser, I think it's a pretty good update. But this music thing is really bugging me. For the record, I've tried rebooting the phone. I've tried changing through the AVRCP versions in the developer options, I've toggled Dolby Atmos on and off, changed the sample rate, channels, etc. Nothing seems to be affecting this problem.
On a side note, how do I close the music player so it doesn't automatically start playing when connected to bluetooth?
Thanks in advance. If this doesn't belong here, let me know.

DarcSystems said:
I've been experience a few issues with the new update. One of them, which is more a nuisance than anything, is my bluetooth connection to my car. It's a 2015 Mustang with MyFord Touch. The phone is a galaxy S8+. About 1/3 of the time when I start the car, the phone shows up named a bunch of random characters, instead of Galaxy S8+. Not a huge deal. My music player starts automatically (even if I close it, and kill the process). The thing that's weird is that the audio is kind of hollow sounding when it starts up UNTIL I turn on the phones display, then it kicks into a fuller sound. It's never done this before. Not only that, but it decides when it wants to display track information from Samsung music player only a small portion of the time.
If I'm playing music through Amazon Music, it updates the track information, no problem. If I switch to Samsung's music player, it just displays the last track I played on Amazon music, and never changes. If I start the car with the music player going, it won't update track information until it gets to the next song, and even that is spotty.
Aside from these issues, and the issues I'm having with the default browser, I think it's a pretty good update. But this music thing is really bugging me. For the record, I've tried rebooting the phone. I've tried changing through the AVRCP versions in the developer options, I've toggled Dolby Atmos on and off, changed the sample rate, channels, etc. Nothing seems to be affecting this problem.
On a side note, how do I close the music player so it doesn't automatically start playing when connected to bluetooth?
Thanks in advance. If this doesn't belong here, let me know.
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Did you ever try to update your car's firmware or going to your dealer and ask for it? I think it's because Android 9 is "too new" for your car

I updated to the latest firmware about 6 months ago. No new updates since then. It would be kinda bogus if android 9 made a 4 year old car obsolete, but i suppose it's possible.

DarcSystems said:
I updated to the latest firmware about 6 months ago. No new updates since then. It would be kinda bogus if android 9 made a 4 year old car obsolete, but i suppose it's possible.
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It could be possible that you have to expect for a new car firmware or ask to your device forum if anyone else have your same problem with android auto

Good call. I'll pop the question over to my mustang forum. Thanks.

DarcSystems said:
Good call. I'll pop the question over to my mustang forum. Thanks.
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Post it on your mobile device forum too