Android and free music

Free music reviews are a fine thing, but knowing that there's free music out there and being able to conveniently listen to it on whatever devices you have handy are not the same thing at all. I thought I'd spend some time on how I do that and what tools exist to make your life easier if you have an Android phone or tablet like me.



The Desktop - To Phone Approach

First off, here's what I do. I have a desktop system with iTunes installed. I use iTunes because I started managing my music collection back when I had an iPhone, and that made iTunes the obvious choice. Many third-party tools like Amazon's music downloader, however, know how to integrate with iTunes, so it's not a bad hub for your free music.

To get music into iTunes I either download from a Web site like Jamendo.com and then import using "add folder to library" in iTunes, or I use a third-party tool like Amazon.com's music downloader which automatically adds its files to iTunes.

I then use the iTunes "Consolidate library" feature (located under "File->Library->Organize Library" these days) tool to copy all of the files into the iTunes music tree.

To upload to the phone, I use Google Music. The Google Music uploader can be told to automatically upload all iTunes music and playlists whenever they change, so I don't have to do anything else.

On the phone the Google Music app will play all of the newly uploaded songs, as long as they were all in formats (e.g. mp3) that Google Music can cope with.

If you don't want to use iTunes, you can skip the desktop music organizer app entirely and just upload directly to Google Music using the uploader or you can use an iTunes-like program like MediaMonkey in place of it.

Pure Phone Approach

If you want to interact with free music directly from your phone, you have a few choices. First, you can always use advertising-supported music players like Pandora, but their selection of free-if-you-want-to-download-it music tends to be pretty poor.

Thankfully, Jamendo.com, which is one of the largest repositories of free music in the world, has its own Android app, Jamendo Player. From that app, you can access lots of the music reviewed on this site, including Tunguska Electronic Music Society, Atomic Cat, and Celestial Aeon Project.

You can also download music directly to your phone, but this can get really messy, since file management under Android is only marginally better than the non-existant file-management on the iPhone. I recommend that you stick to third-party apps and using a desktop uploader app as your primary tools.

A Note About Amazon


I've talked about Google Music, above, but just about everything I've said holds true for Amazon's Cloud Drive and the associated Amazon Cloud Player app.