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

[bobbrear]

Basically every time I start up spotify the previously downloaded playists that were green are now grey and not avaialble and have to be downloaded again, costing me a fortune in date by accident.

I click the button to save them for offline mode but in offline mode they appear for only a short time and play only the first ten seconds, then the time bar keeps moving but no music plays.

I go out of the app and on retunr they are all undownloaded.

Often I have to restart the phone to get it to even stream again.

Annoying as I pay for premium and use it mostly on my phone.

[123vesla]

Hi

Having the same problem, GREATLY ANNOYING, but using two different laptops (windows 7 / Toshiba Satellite + AcerOne), not a phone. Any other thread for this, please give me a link? Only found old threads about this, so maybe there already is a solution somewhere (without having to copy the playlist into a new one and remove the old one, I hope..) Not keen on continue paying for an offline alternative (premium), when I need to have internet connection to get access to my offline playlists.

As several others have been posting, it can be verified that the playlists are synced and should be accessible offline,although they are not, memory not an issue. We are paying for offline access -what´s the use when you need to be online when logging in? It continue to play and I have full access to switch tracks and so forth if I remove the internet connection after being online. But no go logging in to anything but currently empty playlists if you are offline in the first place. What´s the idea? I have been paying for premium for over 1 year with the same problem, feeling played...

Also agree that the playlist showing currently empty varies from all of them to some of them. Can't see that OS, hardware, memory, spotifyversion, reinstalling/clean install or any other standard support ideas of "narrowing down by just doing something that feels meaningful" has got anything to do with it. One posted so huge amount of data from his computer in detail, I got scared when the "helper" despite this couldn´t help him at all, not even through remote assistance. What a joke. Now the poor **bleep** has to sync it all over again without having the problem solved. Well, not me. Get a fix, this is sooo old news. I´m tired of paying for a service which doesn´t exist....please repost in relevant thread if found....thnx....  M

[MatíasMartinez]

I have the very same problem. Isn't support staff taking consideration of our case?

[Joe]

There seems to be an official bug topic for playlists not staying downloaded here so spotify is keen to collect relevant data. I would also strongly recommend switching the cache to internal storage as requested in Per's post to help narrow down the problem.

[icksie]

I had playlists on my mobile device set to "available for offline use", which reset themselves to "not available for offline use" without any apparent reason (this might have happened after spotify had been updated by the play store, though I am not certain about that).

[sWi7zLe]

Spotify keeps adding my S3 to my Offline Devices list until it i reaches the device limit and it wipes all my music...

It will add another device after losing connection, then reconnecting. Is this some sort of a joke?

I'm fed up with coming to use Spotify in my car only to find all my playlists have been wiped. And the most irritating part is that all the songs are stil stored on my phone.... but will Spotify sync back up with them?? Will it ****! I have to download everything again!

So today i thought, I can't take this anymore... I'll put some of my own to my phone for use with Spotify.... oh that's not possible !? WTF!!?!!?

Oh, no i have to Sync them over wireless from my pc....  21 songs of 301 copied (on a 1 month old 64gb Samsung SD with 50gb free):

Syncing Error! Offline syncing has been stopped as there's no space left on this device.

Errr

I can't believe I'm actually paying to use this useless piece of software. I've been with you since the beta and I have to say that you turned a truly superb piece of software into a painfully frustrating waste of my time!

Could someone please recommend an android music player app, which will allow me to play my own music, similar to Spotify... except for that part where it actually works?

[Joe]

Your S3 appearing multiple times in offline devices is definitely weird. Is anything at your end possibly triggering this - ROM changes or anything? If you get in touch here, the support guys should be able to fix it. If you get an automated response directing you back to the community or to the help pages, please reply to it to speed things along.

Let's get that fixed first then we can take a look at your other issue.

[sWi7zLe]

I've already contacted support, they have suggested formatting my SD card but that never seems to help.

The last thing they said was to create a new account and they'll transfer my playlists etc across, but that is regarding the problem I have with a notification to follow Emelie Sande which I have been getting every day for over a year 😕

I've just backed up my phone and will be wiping it and starting over later today, don't really want to do this as its been working really well lately... apart from Spotify.

[jroshan]

I'm a premium user with this issue both on wifi and normal data service... please help this is incredibly irritating

[mlazzarotto91]

Hi, I have a strange problem that's not strictly correlated to OP.

Each time I choose to download a playlist (with a lot of songs eg. 100 songs) on my phone (it saves the songs on my external CLASS 10 MicroSD), after some minutes the download hangs: I discover this because Spotify shows it  is downloading the same song forever.

So at first I try to stop download, but after choosing "Stop downloading" nothing happens: I still have the notification and it still tries to download my playlist; but the only thing I can do is restart the phone.

After the restart, when I open Spotify, the playlist begins to download my songs, but not from the point where it stopped before, in fact as I discover later, when it seemed to hangs, in fact it continued the download.

Example: Spotify begin to download a playlist of 100 songs. It seems to hangs at 50th song, so I restart. At boot, when I reopen the app it continue to download not from the 51th song but from the 80th song, in fact when it seemed to hangs, it was not!

[Parsec]

I have a Samsung Note 2 with 4.4.2 firmware and spotify 1.0.0.82, with microSD 32Gb.

today i have download a lot of album with my music feature and 2/3 playlist and i have found a strange problem....

the offline data are go on my Internal memory and not on my microsd

on previus version the offline data go on microsd perfectly

[mlazzarotto91]

Great news!

After I have installed this Android app SDFix: KitKat Writable MicroSD (root needed), now it works like a charm!

In practice the app goes to modify the file /system/etc/permissions/platform.xml, allowing ALL APPS to write to the external sdcard, by addressing a limitation in Android 4.4 Kitkat.

I hope this app could help someone else.

[Parsec]

Yeah!
Problem solved!!
I have installed sdfix and I have make the mod..
I have delete all Spotify data... Uninstall the app... Reboot... Reinstall Spotify and.... Offline music on sdcard 🙂
Thanks!!

[charliebig]

I offlined loads of songs on my Android, however, when selecting the option "show only offlined content" I see all the songs in the "songs" tab, but none in the "album" or "artists" tab.

Wouldn't it make sense to see offlined songs sorted per album and artist in the other two tabs?

[mlazzarotto91]

I am glad that you found helpful my post, but my problem seems not solved. 

From what I understood(and seen) Spotify downloads offline playlists as long as the screen stays on, as soon I turn off the screen (and the phone goes to sleep), the app stops to download, and even after a force close of the app, it still does not resume downloading after relaunching the app.

So the only solution I found is to choose a high screenoff-timeout and keep the screen on.

Is someone having my same problem?

[jwaldenco]

I have followed the directions for offline playlist downloading troubleshooting.  I have now reloaded Spotify 3 times on my Android and once my computer at home.  Turned both off right after I uninstalled the program. 

I am still having issues with offline playlists.  Everytime I sign in I have one of three senarios on my Android.  The Browse screen defaults when I try to download a playlist, or the desktop computer cannot see my device and stops the download, or the desktop computer moves back to the device page when I try to sync the playlists. 

Advice please.

[elinetu]

After spotify updated to the "new and better looking version", spitify is constantly crashing. I have a Sony Xperia Z1, and a spotify premium account. If I try to download one of my playlists, spotify crashes. If I'm lucky enough to download one playlist, and try one more, spotify crashes and resets. Also, when I exit a playlist to enter another one, spotify crashes..

[charliebig]

How come that I can't add a whole album to an already existing playlist but have to add every song one by one?

[digitalmaestror]

The latest upgrade of Spotify pretty much wrecked Spotify on Kindle Fire (first gen).

It used to work beautifully, but now it takes more than one to two minutes to load and often stalls and crashes.

Off line content no longer saves. And for gods sake the stars are gone!  What's up with that?

The new design is a giant leap backwards.    There seems to be no way to "unstar" content without deleting it.  You used to be able to simply highlight and unhighlight a star.  The plus and check are counter intuitive. What does that even mean?

You can no longer "sort" a search (by album or title) unless you save it as a playlist first.   If you have an artist with many many "albums" you can't sort by album anymore.  So how can you find an album?

And worst of all you can no longer shuffle play your entire library  when on line, only your "star" items!

Great new look? Great failed funtionality!

Please PLEASE PLEASE just restore the previous version of spotify.  It has been a great product, I have recommended enthusiastically to friends every since I began using it...   As a paid subscriber, I am very close to cancelling.... Upgrades should not "remove" core features, (MOST OF THE CORE FEATURES AT THAT), especially for users who are paying ten bucks a month for "service"  Please get this fixed.... Many of these comments apply to the PC interface at well.

[icksie]

Most of my problems were fixed by canceling the subscription and choosing another music streaming service 😉