Feedback Request: iOS Offline Issues

[Rorey]

Hello everyone! Spotify here.

We are looking into customer reports about issues with offlined playlists on iOS devices (music which is downloaded to your phone so you can play without an internet connection). Our investigation shows that some folks might have experienced some issues with this so we were hoping you could answer some questions to help us diagnose the problem.

1. Have you made a playlist available offline which you could not play without any internet connection?

2. Have you made a playlist available offline which constantly downloads when you start Spotify?

Thanks,

Team Spotify

[Swanny]

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@4legit2quit wrote:

One:  For some songs in my playlist the album cover won't show up but for others it does, whether it be on my lock screen or in the app itself.  It's not a major issue though I would like to know how to fix it.

Two: Not sure if this belongs here but I have recently been having trouble with downloading songs that I put into a playlist I selected to be played offline.  I've checked and I have more than enough space for the songs and need to know what I need to do to fix it.

Thanks in advance!  The app is great overall, just needs these few bugs to be fixed out!  

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For one, it's a known issue that's been reported. There's no ETA on a fix at the moment. See the dedicated thread here: http://community.spotify.com/t5/Help-iOS-iPhone-iPad-iPod-Touch/no-album-art-in-off-line-mode-with-s...

For two, there is a limit of 3,333 songs per device that can be saved offline. Also, songs will only sync when connected to wifi (unless you play the song when it's in online mode, in which case it will save as offline from the cached version).

[dbuniverse]

Yesterday I had about 150 of 200 songs cached to be listened to offline on my device.

While online I navigated to Your Music > Songs and quickly toggled the Available Offline switch to off, then immediately back to the initial state of online.  Each song which was previously downloaded was removed from the offline files cache and queued to download all over again.

A mechanism which either warns the user or handles the toggle to offline less like a purge and more like a switch to turn off sync could be useful.  Nested under settings, a function could be used to remove the items cached offline from the device.

[Peter__]

On my device in your situation, the songs appear to redownload but they aren't actually using any data so I'm guessing it is just rescanning the cache.

[airwhale]

So, basically I find that Spotify off-line access works as I expect across my devices (Mac, PC and iOS devices). However, I did experience an issue with sound quality the other day. My devices are all set to stream and sync music in the "Extreme" quality, which really should be enough for anyone, right? I expect the tracks to be in Ogg Vorbis 320kbps quality. Still, listening to a few track of the new Nikki Yanofsky album "Little Secret", I felt something was off. Sound was extremely compressed and lacked definition, instruments were muffled and it was very apparent in this particular album.

So, I went over to iTunes and bought the album. Listening to these tracks, it became obvious that something was wrong with the Spotify version. The iTunes track sounded MUCH better, so I'm wondering if just maybe, Spotify somehow is not honoring my request for the "Extreme" quality of files to be downloaded? Sure, for streaming, I can accept a lower bitrate file when the bandwidth is insufficient (much better than silience) but for synced tracks, I really do want a better sounding file. Also, being on a 4G network in central Stockholm, bandwidth isn't the issue here, downloads are wicked fast. I kinda doubt that the differences in sound between a 256kbps AAC and a 320kbps Ogg file can differ this much in favor of AAC, but of course, this is a possibility.

The comparison was made on my iPhone 5s with the same set of decent headphones, so hardware was the same. Now, if there only was a way to verify the bitrate of the files in my offline library...

Any ideas about what can cause this extreme difference in audio quality between iTunes and Spotify?

Thanks!

[Peter__]

Not all of the catalogue is available at 320kbps (although the vast majority like 99.9%+ is). Unfortunately you will come across occasions when a track hasn't been given to Spotify by the record label at that quality level.

[airwhale]

Replying to myself here after doing a few more investigations.

So, my earlier testing was done on the iPhone 5s and a Windows PC. I also used the "Spotiamp" client suggested somewhere else on this forum to verify that the the stream was identified as 320kbps.

Today, back at my Mac, I downloaded the album to iTunes via iCloud and also made the same album available as an off-line playlist in Spotify. Then, I hooked up my external DAC/headphone amp with my nice big AKG cans. Imagine my surprise when the two versions (Spotify and iTunes) now sound almost identical. Sure, there are subtle variations in the sound, but only minor differences that probably are caused by the file formats and their different encodings. (Using the Macs "Headphones out" also produced a similar result between the files, even though not as good as my external DAC.)

So, back to the iPhone I go - the AAC file from iTunes is already sounding great, so I go back into Spotify. Here I delete the offline version of the album, I create a new playlist and download it again. This time I download over WiFi, last time I used the 4G cell network. My subjective experience is that the Spotify file now sound better than before - however, the difference between the AAC version and the Spotify OGG version are more pronounced on my iPhone.

This leads me to the following conclusions:

• * The Ogg decoder used in Spotify for iOS is not as good as the one used on the Mac
• * The files streamed to my PC reported to be 320kbps, but sounded terribly, so
1. 1) same decoder issue as for iOS -or-
3. 2) the reporting of the actual bitrate of the file was incorrect in "Spotiamp"
• * The increase in sound quality is consistent with a higher bitrate encoding, so the files previously downloaded to the iPhone might not have been the "Extreme quality" files that I had set in my Download preferences.

[rhc1988]

I am having similar issues. Each time I close Spotify on my iPhone 5S and reopen, it is redownloading my offline music.  I am trying to play them and they will not work, as I have turned off data usage for Spotify. I only have 2G of data a month, so I download my offline music and turn off data.  Then I have all my music available when I travel.  Now it will not stay on my device.  Anyone else have similar issues where it keeps deleting and trying to re-download?

[stephen_nash]

I have used Spotify premium for a few months and it has been working well on my iPhone 5.  In the past week or so it has started crashing mid-way through an album.  It seems to be doing this consistently when playing any album, but only whenin offline mode.

I've tried re-installing and that did not solve the problem unfortunately.

Any ideas, or is this a bug?

Thanks.

Stephen Nash

[stephen_nash]

I have used Spotify premium for a few months and it has been working well on my iPhone 5.  In the past week or so it has started crashing mid-way through an album.  It seems to be doing this consistently when playing any album, but only whenin offline mode.

I've tried re-installing and that did not solve the problem unfortunately.

Any ideas, or is this a bug?

Thanks.

Stephen Nash

[Boogietld]

I am having difficulty getting my offline songs to sync to my Ipod. I selected the erase and sync option but all it has done is erase everything. How do I sync my spotify playlists?

[Joe · Accepted solution]

Which ipod exactly do you have?

[Boogietld]

I have a 4th generation Nano.... perhaps it's too old for spotify? 😞

[Boogietld]

ahh I found where it saya  spotify supports iOS 5 or later... boo... thanks for asking the right question!

[andydyer]

Guys,

I need your help.

I have two issues which are really annoying me with spotify for iphone/Ipad at the moment:

1. I make a playlist available offline, but not al of the songs on the playlist become available offline, so i can;t listen to them without a connection. 

2. I find a song, love it, play it loads, and then it gets taken off spotify seemingly.

How can I/you fix these issues?

Thanks,

Andy

[Peter__]

In response to 1, are those tracks stored as local files on your desktop Spotify?

[alanblank]

I have written before about constantly needing to resync my offline playlists.  Suggested solution was uninstall/reinstall spotify on iphone 5s which I did and took the further step of resetting the phone entirely but saving the data.  It seemed to work for a few days but now I am back to having to resync every time I use spotify.  Seems like a poor way for an app to work. Using osx 10.9.4 on desktop and latest version of ios on 5s.  It's pretty frustrating as I use spotify everyday exercising.  HELP

[jeremygoh]

@alanblank

How much free space do you have on your iPhone?

I realized that when the Spotify iOS app is low on disk-space, it will start to lag.

You might want to check by going to iPhone Settings -> general -> usage to see the disk space. Spotify needs at least 1GB of free space to operate.

Also, each Premium account has a 10,000 offline song limit, spread across 3 devices. This means each device can store 3,333 songs max for offline access.

So once you have the 4th device on available offline mode, it will kick out one of your device.

You can check your list of offline devices here:
https://www.spotify.com/sg-en/account/offline-devices/

[fiebz]

Hey everybody,

I had the topic that sometimes, after starting spotify on our iPad or on my HTC One, the offline playlists/music is just gone. So that I have to switch the download button again. The music/playlists are in the lists yet, but not offline available anymore.

So this is really really annoying becaus it takes time to re-switch the buttons for the downloads again...

Can you please help and fix this problem? Most of the times this happens after a update of the app.

[wiser_than_you]

I think I have a little bit of a #2 problem but a little bit of a #3 which is " Do you have a playist that isn't downloading all of your songs when you try every way to put them in offline mode?''.....Yes, yes I do.....Well the problem that I'm having is that my songs won't sync into offline mode. I tried hitting edit on the screen that shows my playlist then clicking the circle with the arrow so it trurns green. But, when it turned green i was like "my problems are now solved...", then i saw it said syncing 1 0f 104 im like..."I have 154 songs on my playist, that makes no sense..." then in the middle of syncing the banner/ sign that told me "34 of 104 songs synced" dissapered as if it stopped syncing and im like "What the...why would you stop now?" so i go check on my playlist and most of the songs are synced and some aren't in a random fashion...Its not like two songs would be sycned and one wouldn't be, like in a pattern, but it was random like 20 songs in a row would be synced then one wouldn't be. Then 5 would be synced and 3 wouldn't be....It basically made no sense what so ever. I even tried going on my laptop syncing the playlist on there hoping something would change when i exited out of spotify and logged back in on my ipod. But, NOTHING HAPPENED!!!!!! At some point it did the whole stopping in the middle of syncing like 5 times before i was just surfing the internet on my laptop trting to find a way to fix this....so now im here telling people about my failed atempt so they dont have to go through the same thing...This sucks... -_- ....That's what my face looks like right now while tying this....I'm so upset because i use spotify in offline mode like every single day I even sleep with my headphones in my ears and my music on because they help mr sleep faster ( no joke ) and i messed it up accidentally by pressing the available offline button turning it off by accident....now not all of my songs are synced. But, the real reason i'm mad is beause it's the good songs that aren't synced....Story of my life....

[antkn33]

I constantly have problem 1. I use an iPad with the las test iOS. It has happened with many versions of the spotify app.
The weird thing is the storage usage for the spotify app still says it is almost 3gb so I think the songs are still there.

[bdberlent]

HAve been a premium user for a year. For the last few months, whether on line or off line, my music will "pause"

and not come back for a while. When driving, this makes me insane, as I do not want to have to play with my Iphone.

I can usually get the music back on by hitting paly, paus, play - and it returns.  Bit this never use to happen.

Any suggestions?