Excessive Data and Battery (Play Music on Nexus 4)

[Simian]

Anyone else notice that Google Play Music seems to be chomping through an extraordinary amount of Data (and battery) on their phones??

I'm not using the Pay Service, I'm just using it to store/stream my Music to my Nexus 4 (rather than fill the memory as it's not expandable!).

Strange thing yesterday (and I've noticed and been monitoring in the last 2 weeks or so) Even when I don't use the service (I still have an old iPod Nano that I use from time to time) my data usage when on Wi-Fi seems to be massive! (I've not checked on 3G/H+ yet).

Take yesterday, I was at my Computer all day, so didn't need to use my phone to stream my music, but it seemed to still use close to 300Mb of 'Background' data! and even with the phone sitting virtually untouched the battery was down to 67% by 4pm (from 6:30am when I unplugged). Current wi-fi usage this month is sitting at 3.2Gb since the 5th!!.

I'm not worried about the Data usage really (I use wi-fi at home, and when out I'm on a 3 Unlimited tariff), it's the battery usage!!

I'm worried that it'll keep going like this whilst I'm out and about and the battery will be dead in 6 to 8 hours!!!

Does anyone know of this (or any similar) problem?, and any fix or tweak to solve it!!

Cheers
Sim

 

[tom_e]

Have you got any of the options about downloading or caching ticked? You could always try uninstalling it and putting it back on.
I don't notice a massive battery drain from it on my S4 and I've chomped through 14Gb of data with it this month but that's because I use the paid service and use it to stream most of the time I'm in the office or traveling so about 6-7 hours a day.

 

[Simian]

The App Settings...

Someone suggested Ticking this box...

But that made things jittery and playback kept failing when the phone either locked/slept or I opened another app (chrome, gmail, facebook etc...)

 

[mjones1]

Untick automatically cache while on wifi.

 

[Simian]

I'll see if that does it.

But as I'd not actually used the app yesterday, why would it cache anything to my phone? let alone 300Mb of data??