How to Hide Audio Files in Android Music Player Apps

How to Hide Audio Files in Android Music Player Apps.

In the era of music streaming giants like Spotify and YouTube Music, quite a few of us still love to carry our music with us offline. These are old records that are either hard to find anywhere else or too valuable to be sent to the trash. Anyway, we audiophiles have an app to play music on Android, and we love listening to songs offline. The only problem is the music player will scan all audio files in all formats on the smartphone and display them for us. For example, calls are recorded.

My music player app thinks that I would like to listen to all calls that I have recorded between music sessions. It can be both frustrating and damn annoying. You might think that after all these years they will be able to distinguish, but no. Today we’ll see how we can hide certain types of audio files from appearing in our newly added playlist!

Let’s start.

Also Read: 8 Best Music Apps for Windows 10 PCs

1. How to hide media files

Audio files are nothing more than a specific type of media file. There are ways to hide media files stored in a folder on your smartphone’s internal storage. The only problem is that they didn’t make it easy to discover or even understand. On the other hand, the trick to hide these media or audio files stored in a folder is easy to implement.

Launch your favorite file viewer application. If you are using the default explorer app that comes with your smartphone, I would suggest you download Solid Explorer or FX Explorer. Both are powerful, easy to use, and offer features you might find useful, including hiding audio files from your music player.

For this post, I will be using Solid Explorer. Are you ready? Launch Solid Explorer on your Android phone and navigate to the folder where the audio files are saved. This can be WhatsApp media, recorded calls, Instagram audio, or whatever. For now, let’s say you want to hide WhatsApp audio files. Go to the audio folder. Here is the folder structure:

Internal Storage – WhatsApp – Media – WhatsApp Audio

Inside this folder, click the “+” icon and select New File. Now name this file .nomedia (including period) and save it. Please note that the file is empty and you do not need to write anything inside it. Just name it as I said and save it in the folder containing the audio files.

Now you will repeat this process and create an empty file named .nomedia in all folders for all applications that show unwanted audio files inside your music player. After you finish creating the required files, restart your smartphone once and check if you can still see audio files or not.

If you can still see the audio files, it might be a cached version of the files you currently hid. This means you will have to clear the media storage cache to remove them from the music player app. To do this, open “Settings” and go to “All Apps”, where you will see a list of media storages.

Click on “Clear data” and select “Clear cache” in the next pop-up window.

Do not click on Clear All Data, as this can delete all data, including files and more, from your media storage. You don’t want that, do you? After deleting the cache files, restart your smartphone again before checking the music player app for unnecessary audio files.

Also Read: 8 Best TuneIn Alternatives for Your Music and Radio Needs

2. Music player settings

The default music player app that ships with smartphones is often less stellar. They are mostly mediocre. There’s a reason the Play Store is full of third-party standalone music players. Some of these apps have a feature that allows the app to search for music files only in certain folders. This can be a boon for many of you who see unnecessary audio files in your music apps.

One such application is Poweramp. There are many others like BlackPlayer and so on, but I love Poweramp because it is beautiful and comes with a really powerful equalizer. Depending on the app you use to listen to music on your smartphone, this option may or may not be present, and if available, it may be located elsewhere in the settings menu.

In Poweramp, you can see the call records are displayed along with my collection of songs.

In Settings, tap the “Library” option.

Here you will find all sorts of options and settings to manage your music library, such as selecting the music folders you want Poweramp to scan for audio files, the ability to ignore video files if you don’t want to play music videos, import / export playlists, and rescan library after adding new music tracks. We will select the Music Folders option for the purposes of this tutorial.

You will now see a pop-up window where you can select all the folders where you have saved music tracks, leaving the rest of the folders unselected.

Once you’re done, click on “Select Folders”. This will force Poweramp to rescan the selected folder and delete any previous audio files it scanned. Now you should only see your audio tracks, without any unnecessary audio files that you don’t want to listen to.

Also Read: How to Transfer Music from Android to iPhone without iTunes

3. Hide files completely

This is the final trick in the post. While the two previously mentioned methods are more appropriate for most of you, some of you may find this more appropriate. Are you receiving audio messages or confidential files? If so, you not only want these audio files not to show up in the music player app, but also hide them completely from the file explorer app so that no one can view or access them.

The .nomedia trick we covered above will only tell the music player application that the files stored in that particular folder are not media files. You can still view them using the file viewer app. Instead, you can hide these files completely, so no matter which application you use, you simply cannot view these files.

Again, there are many apps you can use to hide or lock files, but I’m going to stick with Solid Explorer. Navigate to the folder containing the audio files you want to hide. You can also use this method to selectively hide individual files within a folder. Really depends on your needs. Long press folders / files to show hidden options. Click on the menu icon and select Hide.

This will hide the folder and all files stored in it. Now when you open the music player app, you won’t see these audio file formats with your songs. As you can see, this method is not suitable for everyone, except for those who have confidential and private audio files that need to be kept away and hidden from prying eyes.

Also Read: 5 Music Sync Apps to Stream Music to Multiple Devices

Hide audio files in music player

Here are 3 simple yet effective ways to hide audio files in Android music player app. Honestly, the user doesn’t have to do something so technical and time consuming. The audio player should take care of this initially. But since they don’t, I would recommend that you download Solid Explorer or another premium file management app. I also recommend that you download and install a feature rich music player like Poweramp. These two apps alone will solve most of your audio file management problems.