After spending a few days with a hybrid collection of my own tunes on an external SD card with the GPMAA tunes living on the internal memory of my phone I realised that I was not really giving it the best try out. After deleting my tunes and going through a pretty simple process to remove the subscription tracks I rebuilt my listening library purely from Google Music, taking care not to wildly add stuff an max out the memory again. Browsing albums on my phone I decided that I only wanted a few tracks from a particular album... and discovered I could only download full albums. I tried making a playlist to see if I could flag it for offline play... nope, still need to download the full album. Why Google, why?
Since I had a bunch of full albums I decided to set it up to listen continuously in album order. No chance. The only way you can listen continuously is by playing all songs in name order or by shuffling all music on the phone. Now I have no issue taking a moment to select the next album while at work, but it is just not practical while driving or trying to complete important tasks. The shine is definitely dwindling.
Okay, so I am happily listening to tunes at work and occasionally managing the GPMAA player when it's time for a new album when I notice some songs cut off part way through. This happened a few times and I believe the cause may have been downloads being interrupted as I moved in and out of my Wi-Fi area. What we have here is the music app resuming downloads by seeing what is on the phone, rather than checking that the most recent file downloaded correctly. Since individual tracks can't be downloaded your only option is to remove and redownload the full album. Considering how long the ability to resume partial downloads has been around this is a major failing.
So I'm afraid that the last week has only added to the cons. At this stage I will not be continuing my subscription which is a shame. The GPMAA app is certainly the most stable I have used when compared to other streaming services and the presentation and ease of use is wonderful. It is brought down by lack of flexibility when selecting music for offline play and limited playback options especially if you are looking for continuous listening. Not being able to use an external SD card is a major failing. I am lucky enough to have 16GB of internal memory on my phone, but that needs to be shared with app data, photos and videos which is why I have a dedicated external SD card for storing my mobile audio and visual entertainment. If your phone doesn't have much in the way of internal storage then this service is not for you.
You have piqued my interest Google and I will be keeping an eye out for updates and improvements as GPMAA matures and grows, but for the time being I'm going to have to go back to the old fashioned method of using my own music collection.
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