No easy way to listen to non-music audio files

[Sam Bull]

In order to listen to a non-music audio file at the moment requires opening the file with the music app, as this is the only option when opening an audio file from the file manager app. This results in the music app importing the file into the Music folder, which is very annoying.

I simply want to be able to open/listen to an audio file without it having any relation to my music collection.

2 simple solutions that are possible:
  1. Add content-hub support to mediaplayer-app as a destination, so that it can open audio files.
  2. Stop the music-app importing files into the music collection without being asked to.

[Victor Thompson (vthompson)]

Hi Sam! Thanks for the report. I'm confused as to what you want solution #2 to be. Are you talking about via the Filemanager? If so, you can already choose to not import the file into the Music app... there just aren't any other choices at the moment.

I think the real solution is to have the mediaplayer-app be a content-hub importer (destination) for music files. The user can then choose to open the audio file (import) in the mediaplayer app, which would not move the file into ~/Music because it doesn't need to add it to the user's music library.

[Sam Bull (dreamsorcerer)]

Solution #2 is just making the music-app play the file, without importing it to the music library.

I think it would be better to have the mediaplayer-app solution, but the app doesn't appear to have been getting any updates recently.

[royden (ryts)]

It is an media work-flow (meta-)issue (ie. not just audio) - eg. choose some non phone camera .jpg in file-manager and the only viewing option given is gallery, whereupon the image is imported to an event of that day.

So, same issue whether it is audio, video or image, not so?

[Andrew Hayzen (ahayzen)]

Note, for the music, documents, gallery etc being imported into the apps (causing duplicates).

That portion of this bug feels related to bug 1413821, which describes that the file manager should use the UriHandler instead of content-hub for files that exist inside ~/Documents ~/Music ~/Pictures /media/*/*/Documents /media/*/*/Music /media/*/*/Pictures etc so then the apps do not import them twice but instead just open/play the media.

[Sam Bull (dreamsorcerer)]

That would not fix the issue for me. I specifically store podcasts in a separate directory from ~/Music so that they do not appear in the Music app. I want to play these files without having them imported into ~/Music, without them getting played when I listen to my music on shuffle.