Force update of Google Play Music Library

I have been using Google Play music library for a few weeks now and have been very pleased with it. It is a convenient way to stream music to any internet ready device (in my case an Android phone and a PC). I used to be an iPhone user so iTunes was pretty much the only way I got music to my phone. Now that I have switched to Android I still use iTunes for my music library on my PC, but to listen to the music on my phone I use Google Play.

Google Play, if you are not familiar with it, is a service provided by Google which allows you to upload up to 20,000 songs for free. Once uploaded you can stream music to up to ten devices.

I have read that soon song matching will be available. This means that any song you upload in which Google has a match they will upgrade the file to a matched 256Kbs file on their servers. If I understand it correctly this will mean it won’t even physically upload your file. If it sees the match it just unlocks the file on their server to make it accessible in your library. How cool is that?!?

The only issue I have had has been when I noticed a bunch of my music had messed up tags. I updated them in my iTunes library, but they never updated in my Google Play library. I guess once the song is uploaded it’s done with it.

What I ended up doing (which is probably extreme to most people) is empty my library on Google Play and force the upload manager to upload my library again. I thought that would be the easiest route in terms of work on my end. I don’t care how hard my PC and internet connection have to work as long as I don’t have to babysit it.

I immediately ran into a snag. Apparently, Google Play “remembered” my previously uploaded songs and only uploaded music I had added later. After some searching I found a folder

C:\Users\{user}\AppData\Local\Google\MusicManager

I closed the Music Manger then renamed this folder. Once I started the Music Manager back up it recreated the folder and started to upload my library. It flew past songs it had already uploaded (I’m assuming matching tag information) and then continued to upload all the other music.

This folder is also where the Music Manager writes its log files in case you need to check why a particular song was reported as failed.

Other than that one little snag I would highly recommend Google Play. It makes it so easy to stream music to your PC and other devices. You can even set playlists to be available offline which will download the affected music to the device so you won’t need an internet connection to listen to the music.