Originally Posted by Silent No More:
“Why not just get Spotify Premium and have your music offline?
No data usage at all then.”
I know that downloading music via wifi works well for some, and I did initially try to do that: I've a 64GB MicroSD card in my phone which I used to fill with a selection of music (transcoded down to 192kbit MP3 from my FLAC collection at home). Increasingly though I would fill the phone with music when in one 'mood' then find myself lacking other songs when I wanted to hear them. Nothing worse than filling it with Metallica and then fancying some Elmore James.
So now, I use Google play music (I've uploaded my collection to them - free for up to 50,000 songs) and stream whatever song I want, or have it build a playlist based on a particular song. When I pick a new song it doesn't take at all long to begin playing and it barely ever stutters - certainly never at my workplace (speedtests come in at around 10mbit) and neither on the motorway network. It didn't buffer once while I drove to Surrey and back during the easter weekend just gone.
I find this approach far easier than curating the phone's collection of music, and with Three's AYCE data I don't need to really care about my usage: currently around 10GB a month all told. Vodafone, o2 and EE offer SIM only contracts offering ~10GB of data, so since I'm within the bounds set by competing networks I don't feel as though I'm really going overboard with my usage: if AYCE got withdrawn I could easily cover my usage needs elsewhere (coverage notwithstanding: I really hope I don't actually have to try and use 10GB of data on Voda/o2!)