So I have a swanky new phone, and I’m going to get a new contract with a reasonable data allowance. Currently all my music is ripped from CD and sitting on my laptop and the 32gb SD card that was in my old phone.

Now, I know I could transfer the music from the card to my new phone, but it won’t quite all fit, so I’m wondering about leaping into the 21st century and putting it all up on something like Google Play and streaming it from there. However, I have a few questions:

– streaming must batter a data allowance, surely?
– what happens when I’m offline, like on a plane?

Spotify premium allows for storing play lists off line which reduces the bandwidth too as you can do a sync on wifi too. As for quality I can’t say I can tell any difference.

I pay a tenner a month to spotify so I can download music onto my phone on wifi which then allows me to play music in my car. Also all the family can share the account and download to ipods etc.

Google play is pretty good, you can upload a certain number of songs to google’s servers, then access it for free online.

It works. You can pin the songs you’re most likely to listen to which keeps them on your phone for offline listening.

I’ve got unlimited data though, so I’m not sure how much you use using it. But it’s be good to keep a few favourites on your phone then switch them about when you’re on wifi, but have access to them over the air if you need/want to.

Ref google play
– streaming must batter a data allowance, surely?

Not as much as you might think (eg from memory, not the 3+Mb per track that the original files are so there must be some sort of compression) but yes, if you listen non-stop for ages it will.

– what happens when I’m offline, like on a plane?

You can download selected tracks to your phone so that you can play them when offline.

Spotify works best for mobiles IMO. The offline mode is all I ever use – trying to stream music over 3G is frustrating even with unlimited data allowance.

Depends. I find it works well at work but I wouldn’t want to be using it while driving for example.

trying to stream music over 3G is frustrating even with unlimited data allowance.

I have never had a problem with 3.

I stream all my music from spotify, soundcloud, mixcloud and tunein. I regularly do 5gb of data month, so get that unlimited data package 🙂

Must just be my crap network (Vodaphone).

No problem with streaming here either, even when driving.

However, for some reason, google has decided to replace a couple of my tracks with completely random ones. Which is odd.

Streaming is fine here to using i5 on ee. It does hammer data tho so be careful. Really easy to make playlists available for off line tho. If theres something you’ve just seen or heard and want to listen to there and then its great also via search and stream. Best tenner we spend a month IMHO

I am still “old school”, music ripped from cd, bought on iTunes or acquired from friends. I can have 500-1000 songs on my 16gb phone plus room for other stuff and that’s enough for me. I do have to manage the content from time to time via iTunes to keep it fresh, to be honest that’s easy as I always load up the newly purchased albums and rotate out others. I personally find mobile single (especially EE) too unreliable to consider streaming especially in the car when you are moving between mobile signal masts, also to be honest I don’t listen to enough music to justify spending £120 a year on streaming, I’d rather buy things to own.

I have mate who is keen on music and organised and he buys second hand CDs for peanuts (£1) rips them then sells them on.

Well I’ve just discovered you can’t get the new A Day To Remember album on Spotify or Deezer, so I’m out.

The Google Play paid option (whatever it’s called) is probably the best for me, as you can use the same app you play your music collection and have access to other stuff.

Edit – Google play all access apparently