Help Cannot find music files in phone storage or SD

[Holly Whitbread]

Hi

I use the Amazon Music app and I have downloaded quite a few albums/songs from it.

On the Amazon Music app, they are showing as downloaded. They appear when I look at my 'offline music'. I am able to play them when I am not connected to the internet.

When I look in Samsung files and search for my songs, both in the phone storage and SD, I can find only a handful of those songs on the SD, it's like the rest are not there. But they MUST be, how else is Amazon Music accessing them?
Also, the Google Play app can only see the same handful of songs.

According to Samsung and Google there are songs that are not there. According to Amazon they are.

I've checked download and temp folders and the songs are not there.
I've cleared the cache partition, it did nothing.

Any help you can give?

SOLVED IT: The songs that I have downloaded through Amazon Music but not bought get added to some folder somewhere that I cannot access to prevent me playing them on any device/app other than Amazon Music (since I am technically renting the music through Amazon).
Once I have paid for the album it gets moved to an accessible folder, as I now own it and can do what I like with it.

 

[DonB]

Glad you figured it out, I was just going to ask you if you paid or downloaded free

 

[Hadron]

Edit: the following post is now redundant, since the OP found the answer while I was typing it. I'm just leaving it here because my first guess was correct

Go into Settings > Apps (may be called "App Manager" on a Samsung, they like to rename things), find Amazon Music. How much storage is it using for data (as opposed to the app itself or the cache)?

I've never used the Amazon Music app, but if it's downloaded stuff and nothing else can see it then one possibility is that it's downloaded the music as "internal" app data. Most apps keep their settings, and often other data, in /data/data/<app-package-name>/Databases, which is an area you cannot see using a file browser or any other app apart from the app that owns the data (unless you have root). This is a basic security measure: it stops some other app you might download changing a different app's settings or stealing private data from it. But if Amazon Music considers that you've downloaded this music just so that you can play it when offline, and not so that you can play it in a different app or copy it elsewhere, it might store the downloaded music in there too. I don't know this app, but it's the first possibility that comes to mind.

The other possibility is that it's just copied them somewhere more obscure than you've thought to look. If you have a different music player can it find the songs? Most music players can scan the entire filesystem and find music files wherever they are (provided it's not a protected area like /data/data), so that would be another way of checking.

Finally, can you select a song in Amazon Music and get the app to tell you where the file is stored (look at its properties or something like that)?

 

[mikedt]

Sounds like some sort of DRM (Digital Restrictions Management) on the music files, although that's not something I've ever had to deal with myself