Transferring music from PC folder to Android Phone

[Pato]

I need some help with what I thought would be an easy task, but it is straining my old brain.

I had my music on a memory stick which I put into a folder on my PC. I want to transfer this music onto my Samsung A16+ phone.

I have connected my phone to the PC via a USB cable, but this only showed the drive of my phone and nothing else.

With the help of Google, I eventually enabled "Transferring Files" via Developer Options but I am no further ahead.

Can someone suggest where I may be going wrong please.?

[king1]

usually when you plug in a phone it defaults to charging mode and you usually have to have a look at the notification on the phone, swiping down from the top, and in there somewhere it should allow you to change the mode to file transfer. After that it should show up as a drive in This PC with accessible folders.

You wouldn't normally need to enable this feature in developer options, it just there when you plug in a cable

This might help
https://deviceguides.vodafone.co.uk/sams...and-phone/

[Kame]

To be fair this should be easy, but it was made complicated and is still painfully over complicated.

Not all cables are the same. Some cables are only made for charging and are missing the extra wires for data transfer. This is not your issue because you see you phone's storage. Charging only mode should not show the phones internal drive, but I would need to retest that myself to guarantee that this is the expected behaviour.

Older phones supported USB Mass Storage and new phones have this for backwards compatibility, basically makes your phone act like a USB stick. You could be in this mode as it lacks the ability to mount external drives (e.g. SD cards on your phone). but it will show your internal phones storage.

Now what you really want usually involves 2 protocols that are also used for file transferring. PTP (Photo Transfer Protocol) and MTP (Media Transfer Protocol). I have no idea what you see from your phones internal storage, but if its DCIM or anything picture/photo related, you coukd also be connected as PTP which can lack other file types and may even lack mounting external drives but don't quote me on that, it has been a long long time since I have looked at these protocols. MTP is basically PTP with added extras, why they didn't just increase the version for PTP, I will never know but you want to connect in that mode as its newer and supports all file transfers.

Now heres the kicker, this setting could be in your phones settings, somewhere USB or connection related. It could be that you picked the wrong option when you first connected the phone to your Windiows machine and it now always defaults as the wrong choice. Someone maybe able to guide you on getting that dialog back so you can change your choice as it could be that the Windows option used automatically puts your phone in that mode.

Another thing, Samsung has its own software for file transfers. You may need to use that instead. Is it called Smart Connect or Smart Transfer? I can't remember but they definitely have their own software for these things.

Myself, I store files in the cloud and can access them from any internet connected device. Maybe you could store it online first, then download it to your phone but if I had to use a cable, then I would create a server/host setup. Doesn't matter a lot who hosts or not because it usually works both ways in these P2P (peer to peer) connections.

Also, if your phones internal storage is large enough, coukd transfer there first then use a file manager on your phone to move it to the correct location.

But yea, if you think you will use this method a lot, I would try Samsungs software before trying to fix Windows and MTP.

[Pato]

Thanks for all your comments and suggestions which will are very helpful.