Recently, many cloud music streaming services have sprung out, and almost every music lover has playlists on one of them. You can easily stream music from anywhere in the world for free and even see what others are listening. However, cloud music cannot match the comfort and satisfaction of listening to your personal music collection on your PC.
It is fair to say that building and maintaining a music collection is most convenient on PC. That’s particularly true if you have a mix of MP3 backups from your CDs, along with digital downloads. Once organized neatly, you just want to reuse this as much as possible, including on your mobile.
With the help of some dedicated tools and some patience, you can stream all your favorite songs from your PC right onto your Android Phone.
In this tutorial, we are going to show how you can stream your music collection from PC to Android.
Stream Music from your PC to an Android Phone
To stream music from PC to Android, you will need to get help from a third-party app. For this purpose, we are going to use Muzecast app. It comes with a desktop client and a mobile app, you will need to install both in order to connect, and stream. It is easier this way, otherwise, you would have to set up port forwarding and go through other complex procedures.
The app has both paid ($3.99) and free version (ad-supported). The best part is, it will cache all the streamed music, which means that once you listen to a song, you won’t have to stream it again or use Internet data (perfect for offline listening). However, make sure you don’t clear your phone cache unless necessary.
Note: Muzecast can only stream unprotected music, you will have to rip the music if it is protected.
Register and Configure Desktop Client
Download the .EXE file from the official Muzecast website and install the desktop client. Launch the client and in the interface, click on “Click here to Register”. You need to register so the Muzecast Android App will be able to identify and stream music from your PC. Just provide the required details and click on “Submit Registration”.
You will be directed to the main interface again with your new username and password already entered. If you are using an internet proxy then use it and save it, otherwise, select “No proxy” and click on “Next”.
On next page, click on “Add” and select the folders where all your Music is located, you can also select a whole drive as Muzecast only searches for Music.
Below you can configure settings for how the scan will execute. Enter the number of threads that you would like to use. More threads lead to faster scan, but leaves less CPU power for other processes. You can enter the thread number according to the cores of your PC, you can understand more about CPU threads using this little guide.
You can also select scan mode, usually “Normal” mode works great, but you can select other modes as you may desire.
Now, click on next and on the next page, click on Finish to start the scanning process. This may take hours or even days depending your music collection, when it is done, you will see the number of songs ready to stream and a big green circle confirming you are ready to stream music on your phone.
Note: The whole scanning process uses internet data and depending on your collection it can eat up a lot of data. You basically upload music tracks to Muzecast server, so the data consumed will be equal to the size of the music collection uploaded. So make sure you have access to enough or unlimited data, if you are going to upload too many songs.
Stream Music on Your Android Phone
Download Muzecast from Google Play Store and launch the app. You will be asked to enter a username and password, here, enter the username and password you enter to register with Muzecast. Once signed it, you will be asked to “Accept” the “End User License Agreement”, read it and tap on “Accept” if you agree.
On the next page, you will see all your songs categorized by Artist, Genre, Albums and all Songs. Tap on a category and then tap on the song to open menu and Play the song or interact with it in any other way.
If you have any questions or know any other good app that could stream music from a PC to an Android phone, let us know in the comments.