It may have come to your attention that the music player on the Android phones usually list every audio file (.mp3, .aac, .wav etc.) by default. This is useful, but is undesired in some cases as a sound record sent from WhatsApp might start playing right after a song in the music player. In order to prevent this you can create a .nomedia file in the folder that contains this particular audio file. Note that the .nomedia file has no extension and this method also works for other media types!

There are two ways to create this file:

1. Creating it on the computer by navigating to the directory through the file browser on the computer. If you are on Windows you can use the default Notepad to create such a file, but particular attention should be paid when saving the file as it must NOT have the .txt extension. In order to do so click Save As from the File menu and set the type as “All Files” as depicted in the following screenshot.

2. If you do not want to connect your phone to the computer you can download a file explorer app capable of creating files such as ES File Explorer File Manager. For this particular application all you need to do is navigate to the folder that contains the undesired files and create the file .nomedia there. Refer to the following screenshots for an illustration.