Google Music Importer offers an easier way to play your Google Music in other players

January 9, 2012 John F 4 Comments

A few months ago, we showed you how to play your Google Music in the stock HTC music app, or any other third-party music player, for that matter. There were several limitations to this method, however, the most annoying being the lack of any identifying song information, including track titles, artist and album info, album art, etc.

Luckily, Sapien Mobile has stepped up to correct this problem: with the relatively new Google Music Importer, you can quickly and easily grab all of your downloaded offline music files from Google Music and bring them over to any music player you choose on your device – and preserve all existing track info, including album art.

Here's how it works, according to the developers:

When you make your music available offline within Google Music, you are storing raw music files in a special folder on your device. The normal device Media Provider service within Android can't see the music in this folder. That's why you don't normally see Google Music's offline library in other media players on your device. Even if other media players could see the offline library, the filenames are meaningless and the files don't have any ID3 tags. Other media players would not know what the song title is, what album it belongs to, what track number it is, who the artist is, and there is no cover art. The files are just raw music. For all those reasons, other media players can't play those files properly.

This app gathers those meaningless music files, applies the proper ID3 tags and artwork, moves the files to the /Music folder on the sdcard, and updates the Media Provider service. All your downloaded and imported music will be available to any music player installed on the device. You can even move the music to your computer and add it to your iTunes or Windows Media Player library.

I tried it out myself, and it works flawlessly. The only caveat: make sure you read the included instructions before attempting to import your music! I foolishly thought I was too smart for that, and unsuccessfully tried to import my music several times. This happened until I finally caved, swallowed my pride, and followed the instructions exactly as they were written. Once I did that, it was smooth sailing, and now I can access my offline Google Music in any player I choose – tags and album art included.

To make things even better, the developer promises to help you if you run into problems, and will even refund your money after Google's normal 15 minute window in case you're not completely happy. That's not something all developers do, so hats off to them.

Google Music Importer is available for $2.25 in the Android Market.