The Samsung Galaxy S4 and the Seagate Wireless Plus

May 25, 2013
The Samsung Galaxy S4 superphone has outstanding headphone output audio characteristics when used with high-quality headphones. Storing large music libraries consisting of MP3, uncompressed .wav and flac audio tracks requires considerably more digital storage than provided with the S4 smartphone, even when a maximum expansion capacity 64 Gb SD card is added. A compact portable solution for large music libraries is the 1 Tb (1000 Gb) Seagate Wireless Plus (SWP) HD storage unit. The SWP features a self-contained wireless router which can be used anywhere and optionally can operate in "concurrent" mode with any existing Wi-Fi hotspot to simultaneously access the Internet and the SWP. This note will focus on audio storage and playback only. As a benchmark, 1Tb storage provides space for ~ 300,000 MP3 tracks, or 30,000 digital audio uncompressed tracks (16bit/44.1kHz) or the equivalent of 1500 full uncompressed audio CDs, sufficient storage for all but the very largest personal music libraries.

Music Playback with the Seagate Media App and the S4

The Seagate Media app for Android is the standard app for accessing and streaming music (and pictures, video and documents) to your S4 superphone or your wireless laptop computer stored on the SWP. Simply connect to the Seagate Wireless Wi-Fi network and launch the Seagate Media app. If you want to connect to the internet through your main Wi-Fi internet connection, follow the Seagate instructions for "concurrently" connecting the Seagate Wi-Fi network with your home (or public) Wi-Fi hotspot. The images below show the music library listing and the playback screens using the Seagate Media app:

Music Playback with the Samsung Music player app and the S4

It is possible to use the native Samsung media playing apps (Music player, Gallery, Video) to access and stream music, videos and pictures stored on the SWP drive. The Samsung Music player provides integrated DLNA support for streaming music from the S4 phone to any DLNA "renderer" device such as a SmartTV or a playback device such as the Western Digital TV Live (this requires enabling "concurrent" Wi-Fi" mode). To access the SWP from Samsung Music player, from the options menu select "Scan for nearby devices" and the Seagate Wireless drive should be discovered (Note: my experience is that occasionally the Seagate drive is not detected by Music player, and the SWP must be restarted). Select the Seagate Wireless to view its music contents:



The screenshots below show the Samsung Music player screens for track listing and music playback and the Details pane for audio playback of a high-quality 16bit/44.1kHz .wav track. Note that the music playback screen shows the "Allshare" (DNLA) icon at the top left. By default music playback will stream audio from the SWP drive and playback locally on the S4 device. If the Allshare icon is selected, the player will find compatible DLNA "renderers" on your Wi-Fi network allowing you to choose a target device. Then audio will be streamed from the SWP drive, under control of the S4, to the target DLNA device. Very cool!



What about Samsung Link and Seagate Wireless Plus?

Currently, Samsung Link (previously called "All Share Play") can stream content from registered PCs and cloud storage services but not from network storage devices such as the Seagate Wireless Plus. Hopefully Samsung and Seagate will provide this capability in a future update to Samsung Link's PC "registration" capability or update the Samsung Link app for Andriod to provide recognizing the Seagate Wireless Plus as a "Nearby device".