How can I tell Google Play Music to store the audio files on the removable micro SD card (and not on the internal storage)?

Question

How do I set the Google Music Play app to store the local "offline" music on the SD Card? I've used up about 90% of my internal storage.

I've looked in the app Settings and don't see any options for that.

Answer 1

If your phone is rooted you can solve this via a shell command:

mount -o bind [Path to new Location] /mnt/sdcard/Android/data/com.google.Android.music/

(Replace [Path to new Location] with a Folder on your external SD-Card)

It will basically redirect every access to the default folder to the Folder which is specified.

You probably need to do this every time you reboot your Phone, so you may be interested in putting a script which does that into Autostart.

Source: http://forum.xda-developers.com/showthread.php?t=1785245&page=2

Answer 2

I found that I was just able to use a couple of sym-links to solve this problem. All you need is a rooted device. I've written up a simple guide here:

http://charleswilkinson.co.uk/2013/07/24/using-external-sd-card-with-google-play-music-app/

However as requested, here is a summary for posterity:

Prerequisites:

• Your phone must be rooted.
• You must have a terminal emulator installed.
• You must have a file explorer app installed.
• You should know what a terminal is.
• Read here to learn what a sym-link is.

Steps:

1. Go to Settings > Applications > Google Play Music.
2. ‘Force Stop’ the app and clear all app data.
3. Open your file explorer of choice and create a directory (folder) on your external SD card called ‘GoogleMusic’.
4. Inside this directory create two more: ‘files’ and ‘cache’.
5. Open terminal emulator and enter the command: su -
6. The superuser app will ask you to grant root privileges. Hit ‘Allow’.
7. Enter the following commands in order:
   1. cd
   2. /data/data/com.google.android.music ln -s
   3. /mnt/external_sd/GoogleMusic/cache cache ln -s
   4. /mnt/external_sd/GoogleMusic/files files
8. You’re done!

Update: On 5th Dec 2013 an update to the Google Play Music app added a new feature in the app’s settings, allowing you to choose to store files on the external sd card instead which solves this problem so the above solution is now unnecessary.