"Only on this device" vs. "Available offline"

poit57

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Aug 8, 2014
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A few months ago, I reformatted the SD card in my phone, and took me a while before I got around to reloading my music on the memory card. In the meantime, I mostly streamed my music from my OneDrive and previous Store purchases because I don't have a Groove Pass subscription.

Last week, I finally synced my music back to my phone from my computer and set the filter to "Only on this device." After the banner at the top of the Groove app stopped showing progress of adding new tracks to my collection, I was worried because only 279 songs were added. I checked the filter settings again and switched to the option labeled "Available offline." Now it is properly showing 4,104 songs in my collection.

Here is my confusion: What is the difference between these two filter options? Doesn't being stored locally on my device indicate that the songs are available offline? Can there be any other songs available offline besides the ones that are stored "on this device"?

My first thought was that it was being particular about whether the songs were stored on the SD card versus the phone's internal storage, but there is no filter option for the SD card. To be sure, I checked the File Explorer app and verified that no music is saved to the phone's in internal storage. I can't figure out what is different about those 279 songs that show up when filtered by "Only on this device." Those same songs also appear when filtered by "Available offline" along with about 3800 additional songs.
 

Brett Watters

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Dec 22, 2014
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I ran into similar issues. The difference is subtle...

"Only on this device" - the song is only on this device. As far as Groove knows the song isn't on any other device. i.e. it isn't also on OneDrive nor it is in your music store.

"Available offline" - the song is on this device and other devices. Another device could get access to this file via OneDrive or downloading it from the store.

If you have all your files on OneDrive, the two are the same. If you downloaded all your music from the store, the two would be the same. You can think of it as... "Only on this Device" = "Available Offline" - "OneDrive" - "Store Purchases"

I copied my entire collection to OneDrive and the two are pretty much the same.
 

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