Extremely Long Periods of Waiting Time, Error Messages, and Local Song Issues

[MissingElements]

Plan

Premium

Country

 USA

Device

LG

Operating System

Android

My Question or Issue

Okay, so I've been using Spotify Premium for about two years now. And although I switched from iOS to Android about midway through, I still experienced these same exact issues on both platforms, all except one. When I switched to Android, it only got worse, but of course it wasn't that much better before anyway. Anyway, my issues include the following items, which over my two years of having Spotify Premium, I have taken several times to go out of my way to attempt to troubleshoot. Here are my problems:

So the most common and most frustrating one there is that I encounter is this lovely little error that says "Go online to see menu" when I hit those precious three dots for song options. This message appears so much that everytime I hit the dots, that's what I expect to see come up rather than the song menu itself. I've gone up to several song lengths worth of time just straight pressing the button just to see how long it can last sometimes, and I believe the longest predicament has been roughly fifteen minutes. Now when I had iOS, online or not, I never had this message appear. And between two Android-powered phones after switching to Android, this message has appeared on both phones, and yes I was online on both everytime I pressed the button. I find it odd because I asked fellow Android-Spotify users if they ever encountered this issue and I've never met someone who said they have, although I have seen articles about the issue (whereas the troubleshooting never helped). I'm very avid in adding songs to playlists, or checking out the album/artist associated with the song, but this issue comes between me and my song sorting.

Another problem is I frequently catch myself waiting quite a long time for Spotify to respond at times. Whether it's waiting for that "Go online to see menu" message to go away, seeing "Ooops something went wrong" in the search tab, a song ending and staying at the end and the next song not playing, meeting the buffering icon, or waiting for a song to stop continuously freezing every few seconds, it's always a problem that lasts forever. Sometimes it could be an error encountered for a few seconds and I could tolerate that because of course not everything in the world can function properly, but when it lasts for like 5 minutes or more, then that's a little bit ridiculous. It's so bad sometimes that I don't even see the use in paying for premium, especially considering my next complaint.

So my issues between my computers and my phone come together in the sweet spot of local songs not working. I have had quite a lot of local songs take up a playlist, and I'd add more regularly as they would download to my phone respectively, and sometimes I'd even remove some, just regular song maintenence. And now it seems as if I shouldn't even be paying for premium anymore because one day I encountered all of my offline songs just not showing up as downloaded at all. All of them were greyed out and unplayable on my phone. But the download icon on the playlist would show up green, normally confirming that the playlist has fully downloaded. And I would scroll through the entirety of the playlist just to find out that not a single one had downloaded. I know for a fact that I have enough space on my phone, especially considering that the songs used to be there and then suddenly they weren't when nothing had even changed. I even tested through just in small chunks of local songs in seperate playlists and no matter what, the little icon would become green while not a single song had downloaded, even if the playlist only contained one song. After a long time of continuous troubleshooting, I eventually gave up and decided to remove all my local songs from my phone and computer. I'm currently in the process of attempting to move all of those songs into my other computer with edited file names just to make sure the problem was either the computer, or the phone. Or, it could be a problem with Spotify. I'm not entirely sure, but needless to say, the problem is affecting a major purpose of Spotify Premium when it could be not happening at all. Just for the record, I never hit the song limit neither. I had wifi on both devices of course, on the same network, and still nothing.

I of course tried several different troubleshooting methods in order to see if at least something would end up being fixed, and of course nothing has. But my methods include some basic stuff such as uninstalling and reinstalling Spotify, on both my phone and computers, unsaving all of my songs (via computer), and removing all local songs entirely, amongst other methods, all except for factory resetting considering I'm not trying to lose all my data in order to fix these issues. Thank you for any help and responses.

[TomLegend · Accepted solution]

Hey @MissingElements,

Let's see if we can take a crack at solving some of these. 

With general problems with Spotify, one of the best troubleshooting steps is removing your offline devices. To do this you need to head to Offline Devices in your account overview and click the 'Remove All Devices' button. As a heads up, like a reinstall, you'll need to redownload your offline tracks after clicking the button - so it's best to do this around WiFi. As this already removes your songs, it's also a good opportunity to delete and reinstall the app as well - although I appreciate you've already done this. 

If this doesn't help your local files, another good tip for getting them to work is to change the source location of the files. Simply, make a new folder on your Mac/PC, move your local file songs there and then add this folder as a source under the settings.

Let us know how you get on,

/T

[MissingElements]

Alright I apologize for the long awaited response, but I decided to take a lot of time to sit back and let technology take a break, as I had went ahead and removed all offline devices, and turned off all of the offline download options, and just everything to do with the topic I had backed away from all within the time and even before. I decided now would be a good time to check in and see if things are working any better, and what I had done is I moved my music files onto a completely different PC and used them as of course not just a new file source, but a whole new device source. I'm not sure if anything would've got working on my old computer, but after I moved everything onto my other one (which isn't much newer but that doesn't matter), I went ahead and uninstalled and reinstalled Spotify completely and then went into turning on that little offline switch on a playlist curated for offline songs only. And it actually seems to be working now! It's really appreciated that I had gotten the help and advice from you, because it's all working out fine now! And to make things a bit easier on my devices' backs, I'm only doing like a couple of songs at a time instead of overloading it with a few hundred songs all at once, because I also don't know how much space I have. I'm satisfied with this process, and satisfied with your help. I just hope now that songs will always continue to download without problems, and that also something within this process helpfully solved some of my other issues. I'm gonna give some more usage into Spotify on mobile again to see if the ridiculously long waiting timeframes and error messages reduce their persistance, because all throughout my time of trying to get offline songs fixed, those other same issues continued to happen without any changes. In fact a new problem started occuring; every now and then Spotify would just start crashing on my Android device, which had never happened before but now it had seemed to happen all the time. Hopefully that will go away now, because it started happening out of absolutely nowhere and way too consistantly. But I'm gonna consider this topic solved, as a MAJOR part of it has been fixed. Again, thank you. I feel like purchasing premium is at its worth again!