Feedback Request: Android Offline Issues

[Rorey]

Hello everyone! Spotify here.

We are looking into customer reports about issues with offlined playlists on Android (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

[Radoslav]

Hi,

I am now on the Premium trial and I am not able to play downloaded music in my office on Nexus 4.

In the Offline mode, hitting the Play button does not do anything.

In the Online mode I get the "No Internet connection available message" and cannot log out of the application (despite trying to force stop it).

Tried two different mobile networks so far (my provided allows national roaming).

The Offline mode worked during the commute, does not work in my office.

Anything else I can try to make this work?

[Joe]

Do you still have issues if you turn off roaming then restart your phone?

[zielpublikum]

Hi,

I have a premium account and I have exactly same issues as mentioned above like disappearing downloaded offline playlists on my HTC One and iPad. Whenever I see that happens, I really feel disappointed by Spotify.

If this helps, reset my all offline devices and I will resync everything, just for once! What I want is synced devices (android phone, ipad and laptop) and see them always up to date when I am online.

Thanks.

[Radoslav]

Thanks for the suggestion, Joe. I will try that and get back.

I can download either Albums or Playlists - both will work in the offline mode, right?

[Kiiwii]

Why I cannot listen to my local files on my Samsung after Spotify's update.
Now it seems I need to download Spotify Premium on my android to listen to MY local files.

Help me please, I need my songs back. 😞

[Joe]

If you're a free user, this is an ongoing issue for some mobile users. Spotify is working on fixing this irritating problem.

[penttipoika]

Background

I’m spotify premium user, penttipoika. I have the most annoying problem with one of my offline playlist. This occurs in my mobile device Samsung Galaxy S4, it doesn’t happen with my laptop for instance.

I’ve cleared cache, logged again, checked my payment deatails, re-installed, re-updated, re-downloaded/re-named/re-published/collaborated the playlist and searched from the forums to fix this. I also tried to go to settings to set offline mode on and off.

The problem

I can’t access my playlist (it’s called “The hot hits”) with 400 or so songs while not connected to internet. There’s only the circle running on the screen, no matter what I do. If I turn on Wifi it’ll find all the songs immediately. I’ve downloaded the songs for sure. They have the green symbol and download-option stopped showing. Another weird thing that I noticed was that I have some ON-line playlists which contain same songs as my problematic playlist. The songs (only few) can be played through these playlists!!

But every time a try to access my favorite playlist the songs are not there. It only works on-line and that’s not cool.

Thanks a lot!

[fremei]

Hi
I had Spotify premium for many years and never had any problems before with offline playlists on my cellphone untill today... i updated my offline playlists today to my phone. But now they are not available, just greyed out... Please fix this asap....

[Xud1]

I have a possible suggestion for a solution to this (at least for files stored locally on the device).  I made a thread related to this but it was for a slightly different issue (not Premium-related).

Why not just use the media scanner built into Android to scan the device for the music files, then match them to playlists?  Could save a *lot* of hassle, plus you're not tied down to wherever Spotify decides to save the playlists to. (read: songs on external SD)

edit: I believe this is the related class for media scanner (not 100% sure though): http://developer.android.com/reference/android/media/MediaScannerConnection.html

[winternightz]

Hello. Over the past week or more, I have had many crashes with spotify. This has happened in various situations:

1. I will be downloading my preferred playlists over wifi, and when I come to my phone to check on the progress, the phone has shut itself down. I turn it on to find all download progress wiped. 
2. Sometimes simply playing what music I have managed to download, the app will crash and my phone will freeze or shut off. Upon restarting, all downloaded spotify songs are gone.

Instances have also occurred where I have been logged out of my spotify account on the phone.

I have performed a factory-reset at least twice over the past couple of weeks, and nothing has seemed to help. To be honest, the only real feature I desire from the $9.99 I give you every month is the ability to easily and seamlessly download all the music I want to my phone. I really hope this problem is fixed soon.

Using today's updated version, I experienced the same problem as before. Upon reaching around 33% completion of all that I planned on downloading, my entire phone froze. No buttons or screen input would do anything. After a long-press of the lock button to restart, all of the downloading progress was gone. 

(this is on a samsung galaxy S3, by the way).

[Abundance]

I have the premium version of Spotify and i can't download any playlists onto my android and my ipod wont even sync into spotify? Please Help!

[andischatz]

I am a Premium user and when I play synced offline playlists on my HTC One (Android 4.2.2), everything works fine for a while, but after a few songs (sometimes one, sometimes three), playback simply stops. When this happens and I wake the phone, the spotify widget is also gone from the lock screen (while music is playing it shows on top f my facebook home lockscreen). When I unlock, the app is still open, just simply idle. Sometimes clicking "play" will start a song again or I might be able to skip to the next, but sometimes, only returning to the playlist and clicking "Shuffle & Play" again will help. 

This happens whether I'm in offline mode (which I usually am when at the office) or not. Quite annoying, especially when driving.

[Radoslav]

Hi Joe, turning the domestic / national roaming off solved the issue. Thanks again!

[anthonyradice]

Hello, I have had a persistent problem with downloaded playlists disappearing on my Android. So I'm going to try and fill in the template to report this.

 === START OF TEMPLATE ===

Description

When I download playlists, they work for an unpredictable amount of time, and then at some point when I go into the Spotify app, I am no longer logged in. When I do log in, I find that all of my downloaded playlists have disappeared. When I have gone through the process of deinstalling and deleting the data folder, I have noticed that there is plenty of data in there - so it looks like the tracks are still stored on the phone, but for some reason the app can't see them.

What are the steps you took to get to the error/issue?

1. I logged into Spotify on my Android and downloaded some playlists via Wifi.

2. I happily played these for a while.

3. When I opened the app after having left it idle for a while, I was no longer logged in, and the downloaded playlists had disappeared.

What I expected to happen

I expected the downloaded playlists to remain available.

Did you restart your device when troubleshooting in section B?

Yes

Did you read the connection troubleshooting tips?

Yes

Your device

A Chinese Android phone I bought from ebay:

http://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/231051430612?ssPageName=STRK:MEWNX:IT&_trksid=p3984.m1439.l2649#ht_9982wt_...

Device’s Operating System

Android 4.0.4 Jellybean

What type of account do you have?

Premium

(FYI for the below points: Android devices tend to refer to the internal memory as "SD Card" and the SD card you inserted yourself as "External SD Card")

Space left on your device

23.44 MB

Space left on your SD card (if applicable)

7.21 GB

Space left on your External SD card (if applicable)

... GB

Is your device rooted?

I don't know what this means - so probably no

Are you using a custom ROM, if so which one, exactly?

I don't know what this means - so probably no

Did you set your external SD card as storage location?

Not sure. But things seem to get stored on the SD card, so I think so.

Did you manually install an older version before installing the latest version from the Play Store?

No

Do you have the same issue when switching between WiFi/Mobile Data (If applicable)?

I don't think this is applicable

If you said "No", when does the issue not occur?

When using WiFi, 2G, 3G, 4G

My mobile Spotify version

0.7.1.407

My desktop Spotify version (if applicable)

0.9.4.185.g7545a404

My mobile provider and country

Vodafone UK

My username

anthonyradice

Do you have a Spotify (non-Facebook) login?

Yes

Are you logging in with Facebook or with your Spotify login details?

Spotify login

Do you have any screenshots you can attach to more clearly explain your issue?

If so, please paste them here

=== END OF TEMPLATE ===

[Joe]

@Radoslav Ah great. It's not ideal but at least you can listen to your music 🙂

[Zoriel]

I am also having issues with the offline mode on my android device.

I already cleared the cache, deinstalled spotify, deleted the /android/data/spotify folders and reinstalled it but i still got the problem.

Heres what happened:

1.) I downloaded the songs i want to listen to later in offline mode. In this case around 900.

2.) After the download i switch to offline mode.

3.) I exit spotify

4.) I start spotify in offline mode and it only shows a very few files as downloaded

5.) I turn the offline mode off: spotify suddenly recognizes the rest of my downloaded files.

[rickymarino]

I'm experiencing the same, its so frustrating.

[paulschermer]

I'm not sure this is the right topic, but I'll drop it here anyway.

I'm having trouble syncing my LOCAL files from my pc to my android phone

I have a number of playlists, some long, some short, which I wish to transfer to my phone.

I have set the sync to manual, so I can choose the lists I wish to transfer. ( I have a large library, there is no way it'll all fit on my sdcard)

However, when I click the playlist to sync, these settings swich automatically to 'synchronize all files'.

At that moment, my phone shows a pop-up, telling my that I need a premium account to do so.

Since I'm a free-account user, the easy way of synchronizing music is the only reason I use spotifuggle on my phone (and the first reason I installed it on my pc)

This problem showed up somewhere in June, and is bugging my since.

I really hope you can solve this soon, so I can easily enjoy my music.
And that's what we're all here for, isn't it?

*EDIT*

I just found a copy of v06.0.20 online, and this version gives me the same pop-up, telling me I need premium to download files (even my own)

I'm not sure, but I think this version used to work fine. Somehow, it seems this is not an error but a choice made by the spotify team.

Please correct me if I'm wrong (I hope so)

[blueeyes]

Me too...cant hear my music premium user.....please help samsung note 2

[Joe]

@blueeyes It doesn't sound like you're seeing what's described in the first post of this thread. Could you post full details in a new thread and I'll try to help.

Just a reminder for anyone else;

We are looking into customer reports about issues with offlined playlists on Android (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?

 If your problem concerns something different and you post here, there is a strong chance that your issue will be overlooked.