Downloading podcasts audio only?

[HBonifac]

Plan

Premium

Device

Xiaomi Redmi 5A

Operating System

Android 8.1

My Question or Issue

Hi!

Some podcasts have both audio and video, like the Joe Rogan podcast for example. I tried to download a podcast on the Android app for the first time that had video, and a 200 minute podcast took like 10-15 minutes to download (with a very good wifi connection) and I assume the file is huge as well.
Is there a way to download just the audio without the video? I imagine that would take up much less space and download much quicker.

Thanks,
Boni

[Gundawindy]

That screenshot is the playback settings. Tapping on the word playback doesn't actually do anything, like in older versions.

[BrentAB]

That is the same issue I have. Can't listen to audio only because it streams the video also burning data and battery.

[CarlosE]

Hey @Gundawindy and @BrentAB,

Thanks for keeping in touch.

Just to clarify, the Offline Mode option is not available for free accounts. When you download a video podcast episode using a free account, it'll automatically play the video when an Internet connection is available, despite having the Audio-only podcasts option enabled.

To only play the audio version of the podcast episodes you've downloaded, you can head to your phone's settings and turn off data/cellular access for Spotify so the app doesn't use your data and doesn't stream the video playback.

We hope this sheds some light on this. If you have any questions, we're just a post away.

Have a good one.

[Gundawindy]

@CarlosE, 

Thanks for the explanation. I hope that is an oversight by Spotify that will be fixed. I don't appreciate a company trying to convince me to pay them by intentionally making their app inconvenient to use. 

Thanks. 

[jonsgreeen]

I am having the same problem and I cannot get the audio option to show up even after doing a full reinstall. Somehow, it seems to know it is me even after I do a reinstall.

[Alex]

Hi there @jonsgreeen,

Thanks for reaching out about this.

As @CarlosE mentioned above, downloading music and podcasts, respectively only the audio for a podcast is a Premium feature. If you're using a free account you'll have to stream podcasts with the video. Nevertheless, once the app is minimized in the background of your mobile device it should consume less data.

Hope this clears things up.

Cheers.

[Gundawindy]

Hi @Alex,
You can download audio only for the podcasts and then listen to them when you have no reception, but if you travel into reception while it is playing it starts streaming instead of just playing the audio only download, then when you go out of reception again the playback just stops, even though you have the whole audio of the podcast already downloaded. I can't recall if I had to shut down the app and restart it or just close that podcast and then reopen it to get it to play again, but I do remember it was a pain in the ass while i was trying to drive.
As for the data, I was using my phone for navigation so the screen was on but spotify was minimised, but i am fairly certain it was using the same amount of data as watching the video. Don't quote me on that though, because I was driving and by the time I thought this was a problem, I had finished my trips, but I am pretty sure I used a lot of data over those couple of days.
Either way, this is not a method that will convince me to pay for premium. It is much more likely a way that will just frustrate me into not using spotify at all.
Cheers.

[Saywitz42]

It’s in data saver