Local files not syncing to android anymore

[dfwadawdawdwaw]

Plan

Premium

Country

USA

Device

Note 9

Operating System

Android 10

My Question or Issue

I used the feature where you sync local files from desktop to mobile for about a year without any issues. However, recently my phone hasnt been syncing any newly added songs and just gives them a ! error. I reinstalled the app and nothings changed. Support couldnt figure out a fix either 😞

[sjju]

Is it really the case that Spotify can no longer play local files on an android device? This could lead to a lot of defections ..

[raijuta]

why on earth would they remove one of their best features? that's ridiculous

[monocat13]

I have the same problem. On my desktop Spotify recognizes and plays the local songs. On my smartphone (Samsung Galaxy S20+) however it simply doesn't find the songs anymore. "Show audio files from this device" is enabled. I changed the place of storage. I deleted the songs and downloaded them again (yes, they are legally obtained). I finally reinstalled the app. Nothing works.

[sjju]

Over the past five years I’ve been faced with this issue 3-4 times, and the solutions have differed each time. The most recent solution was to change the directory of the local files stored on the hard drive of the pc, i.e. creating a new directory, cutting-pasting the files to this new directory and then identifying this new directory as the source of the local files on the pc. I think I also had to reinstall the app on the android. It looks as though you’ve already tried this, though.

[Diehard7]

I am using Android 13 . I had the same issue. My local files were not syncing up . Only thing I did is allowing an additional permission for the app to access video and photos. You can Tru this. I guess there have been security update in android to block access to app. Hope this helps

[EarHax]

Is anyone really surprised by losing this feature? If you've been conscious within the last 5-10 years, you should've noticed this trend occuring everywhere by now. This is typical, stage-4, corporate capitalism toxicity: pricing increases, and quality/quantity decreases. As the years go by, this is the only way for lazy, greedy, bloated corporations with publicly traded stocks to continue turning a profit for their shareholders. It means dropping support for features, staff reductions, diminishing quality of service, outsourcing, etc. Anywhere that corners can be cut, they will be. Standard operating procedure. Par for the course in this free market economy, and one of the many failures of capitalism and the corporate charter.

The only alternative to this is for corporations to reinvest profits wisely to fund innovation & development of new & improved technologies/products/features that increase the marketability and overall value of their products, and thus increase the value of their stock. But there's more risk involved in this because the increase in value must be greater than the amount of the investment.

So when the board members meet to vote on whether to invest in something that would make their product better, potentially increasing their user base, and raising the value of the stock, or to simply cut funding/support for features, reduce the quality/quantity of the product per unit price, lay off employees, etc. to show immediate profits with little to no risk of a net loss, which way do you think they're going to vote?

Welcome to the fall of Western Civilization. Brace yourselves for continued disappointment.

[EarHax]

On the bright side, I did discover last night that, despite the loss of this feature on PC, when using Spotify on my Mac (possibly since I've had the app locked for at least the last 2 years, and click 'cancel' anytime it tries to update the app), I was able to sync most of the local files from my Mac to my new phone (Pixel 8 Pro, 512GB, AOSP 14, build UD1A.231105.0, rooted w/ Magisk 26.4 (OTA method)), despite the fact that it is running the most recent version of the Spotify app.

Therefore, if you have a Mac, know where to find legacy versions of the Spotify app from 2020, and find the info on these forums on how to lock the app so it can't be updated, there's still hope for getting songs to sync from your desktop/laptop to your phone.

But unfortunately, doing the same for PC (preventing the Spotify app from updating) was so much more complicated that I was never able to get it to work properly. So for all the songs that once may have syncd to the phone from the PC, we'll have to manually copy them to the phone's storage, import local files into Spotify, then manually remove and replace those songs in any of the playlists they have been added to. 😕

[jan_rothenbusch]

After updating to the latest version 8.9.4.304 on Android 13, i encountered a strange problem regarding synced local files. I sync the local files to my internal storage without an SD-card.

After the update I noticed that all my local files were greyed out, so i naturally tried re-downloading the playlists one by one. At first it seemed to have done the trick and that all my files were synced and playable again. But after i closed and restarted the app, the files were greyed out again. Every time i reopened the app, Spotify seemed to have trouble to locate the synced files in the internal storage. Since this seemed to be caused by an corrupted cache, i tried to do a clean install of the app multiple times, which unfortunately didnt fix the problem. Upon further inspection i noticed, that that the local files were downloaded and stored under "Music/Spotify/Synced Files/". This seems strange to me, because in the older versions, the synced files were stored somewhere in the "Android/data/com.spotify.music" folder.

After reverting back to version 8.8.18.509 the issue is gone and i can sync my local files to my mobile device without any probems. In this version the local files are stored under "Android/data/com.spotify.music/files/spotifychache/users/localsync" and Spotify is able to locate the files without a problem.

For now, i will stick to the older version, but i would advise you to look into this issue.

Best regards, Jan.

[theartofdyingalone]

Any recommendations on where to download the old version? I had this issue happen to me this morning. It also seems that the copy that spotify creates upon download is a usable file, however it just won't play the song, even if other players can (tested with vlc and musicbee). Thank you in advance!

[PetrMiksik]

• I've exactly the same problem. Not all local files were affected, but 50% or more for sure. What helped was to copy the local files to internal storage and enable local files in the application. Now I'm able to play approx 90% of local music files now🙂

[PetrMiksik]

Try apkmirror.com. It's safe.

[theartofdyingalone]

As of today, 02/02, I still have the problem on newer versions. I also tried your solution and it works only for about 30% of my local files so ymmv I guess. Hope that someone from spotify notices this and fixes it, probably by mistake, before engineering another great innovation like the "car thing 2" or whatever the flip that was **bleep** <- it says l m a o here

[PetrMiksik]

I really don't understand the purpose of the "Synced files" folder. It contains exactly the files, which are unplayable. The storage folder for synced local files is still the same, in the Android folder. When you clear cache and downloaded files, "Synced files" folder remains untouched. And when you sync the files again, Spotify copies the same files again, but with the indexed suffix. When I checked the folder, I found there are multiple copies of every single file. All of them are visible in "My local files" Spotify folder, appear to be playable, but on attempt to play I get an error the file is unavailable.

[LSMelo]

The same problem. I can't sync a lot of files to windows Desktop to Android... Damned...

[ICELED]

I'm also getting this issue. Spotify has broken local files once again. Why am I even paying for this?

[edichez]

I managed to fix this on my devices, I made a thread here. But the short version is to have clearly separated and demarcated folders meant entirely for spotify to detect files in. These folders should include only the files spotify is meant to add and play (ie, only mp3 files) and all other files should be kept elsewhere on your device. Good luck and I hope this helps you!

[Przemekkk]

Plan

Premium

Country

Poland

Device

Realme 7

Operating System

Android 12

My Question or Issue

I have a pretty weird problem with mobile app. Few months ago it was running great, but after factory reset of my phone everything went wrong. I have a lot of songs added locally to my playlist from my PC and everything was syncing to my phone without any problem. Only thing I needed to do is connecting with my phone to the same wifi as my computer and all of the songs were available even after disconnecting from wifi. Now, none of those songs are available on my phone, they're just greyed out and I can't play them. They are available only if I am connected to the same wifi as my PC, but right after disconnecting from wifi all songs becomes unavailable. I tried a lot of things to make this work.
Firstly I reinstalled an app from my phone and cleaned the cache. It did nothing at all.
Then I tried enabling visibility of local files, and with that I noticed that nearly all synced songs duplicate everytime I reconnect to wifi.
I also tried copying music files from my PC directly to my phone and enabling local files there to see if nothing changes. As you may thing... nothing changed.
I shuffled all of available options in every way possible and it didn't do anything.

What I haven't tried yet is to copy spotify's downloaded music data from pc (from %localappdata%\Spotify\Data) to my phone's spotify music data (Android\data\com.spotify.music\files\spotifycache\Storage) to see if that does something.

Have someone maybe had a similar problem to this and found an answer? I would be thankful for any help.