Play songs from Google Drive

[Kajehart]

Exactly what the title says. I'm trying to get off of local phone storage. I WOULD LOVE to have Poweramp be able to play my songs from the cloud, particularly Google Drive! I would pay more than I did years ago for my premium app to be able to do this! 

[Sleater]

I, too, would like this option to be present. I support your suggestion. 

[ScarletNeko]

Same, though in my case I would prefer support for stuff like SMB or FTP, or even better, access to media servers like jellyfin for example

I wonder if I'll live long enough to see this happen

[andrewilley]

These are already mentioned in the Frequently Requested Features list, and are in the medium/long-term to-do list.

On 4/28/2022 at 9:27 AM, andrewilley said:

• Library access to local sources (e.g. playback of songs from home DLNA or NAS servers, SMB/FTP access, etc).
• Library access to users' cloud sources (e.g. playing your music from Google Drive, Dropbox, or other online locations).

However managing such potentially-intermittent connections reliably and rapidly into Poweramp's library-oriented playback model is not as simple as it sounds. A routine rescan to check that the music library database is up to date might go from mere seconds for local storage to many minutes for large remote resources, or fail completely if there is poor network connectivity at the time.

Andre

[ScarletNeko]

That's where connections to media servers (such as jellyfin for example) instead of file servers (such as FTP for example) makes sense, to me at least, since the server is the one doing the heavy work. Whenever I do changes on my media server for example, the server takes a while to digest everything but as soon as it's done, its just done, the client is pretty much instantly updated, while when mounting an SMB share to my phone and trying to add it to Poweramp library, it's pretty much impossible, the scan always fail after a few minutes.

[andrewilley]

The problem with server-style systems is that they tend to work with their own internal indexes and stream the content via their own formats. Poweramp wants to be given access to to actual source MP3/FLAC/etc files, with all the tag data and cover art, in order to populate its music library database. And over a network, that will definitely create performance issues.

If you are willing to accept whatever the music server is currently dishing out, then I guess that would be easy enough to include in the 'Streams' category in Poweramp - just like a streaming radio station - but you most likely wouldn't get song-by-song accessibility or control in PA.

Andre

[ScarletNeko]

That is true indeed, though one of the few reasons I finally started to work on a real media server project is that jellyfin seems to be able to stream things untouched if the receiver supports it. On the server details if you have a client currently connected and playing something, it tells if it is transcoding the file or not, also depending on your client it might tell you that as well. There's also the resource usage of the server hardware, one might be able to tell if a transcoding is happening by looking at the processes and hardware usage.

I'm still getting into it since I started messing with it recently, but at least for flac files I haven't seen any transcoding happening yet, though all the files tested were normal CD quality since I'm slowly adding things to it.

Probably if Poweramp reports a list of formats/codecs it can deal with (which might be close to the server capabilities as the server also uses ffmpeg), it probably will be able to receive a lossless stream.

The only problem here is ffmpeg taking eons to support 32bit flac but that is a topic for another thread