I was under the (false?) impression that the nextcloud android app would act as a file share and for selected files being able to be offline synced. So each file is accessable either via sharing or locally.
I tried several musci apps. They all scan the local android filesystem for music. They only select the offline nextcloud files.
Is there an android client that is add-free and works with nextcloud music files that are not synced but accessable or is this a ‘problem’ because of how nextcloud handles files?
I know there is a build in music play feature, but that is really basic and I need some more functionalities (like album art, searching by album/artist/genre/etc, playlist management, etc)
I have a similar problem. The included music player in the Android Nextcloud app is quite limited at this point. Or at least, I have not been able to figure out, how to use its features. I am able to play a single song, but then the playback stops and I have to manually select the next file to play. I would already be happy, if I could select several files to play one after another, or if it could play a whole folder. If anybody knows how to do this, then please feel free to share or if somebody wants to implement it, please go ahead. Would be appreciated a lot!
As for solutions, you can use a music player for Android which is able to play files from a WebDAV source. So if you have internet connection, you can stream all your music on Nextcloud over WebDAV to your Android device. I am using the app “ArmAmp” for this purpose. I am not perfectly happy with this app, but it gets the job done.
What I don’t have a clean solution for is playing the files I marked as available offline in the Nextcloud app, when I am off the grid. I can dig deep into the directory tree and find the files Nextcloud downloaded to my device, but this is not very convenient. I guess this is similar to your approach. But if I have a larger variety of files downloaded, it is not very handy to add them to a playlist.
Good luck and maybe someone has better ideas than me.
we were looking at this also - coming from feature requests for the NC Audio Player.
The Audio Player and Music have some way of mobile integration. AP also has Playlists, Categories and so on.
But every web player has the issue, that you can only play the current file in background or when the phone is locked - until the end. It will not play the next one because this is done via javascript which is paused when the page is not active (device performance and battery).
There was the unconfirmed proposal, that the player would need to deliver a playlist-file to the device. But thats not really that simple.
A real player integration with background activity and also lock screen integration (player buttons + cover arts) is only possible with a native app.
Going for an universal Webdav might miss all the nice ID3 indexing features.
So I see only 3 ways:
use the existing web interfaces
use a webdav player
get someone to develop a native app which connects to the API of e.g. Audio Player