Questions regarding downloads

[pturner195]

New to Spotify on trial. I only need to download songs on to my phone for offline playback, not my desktop.

Q1. Am I correct in saying that if I click download on a playlist on my desktop app, it stores the file to my desktops hard drive, and that means I cannot play this on my phone (offline) until I click download on my phone ? i.e If I want music to be available offline on my phone, do I have to download via the phone ?

Q2. (Sort of linked to Q1) If I like to sit at my desktop to browse music that I want to be able to play offline on my phone later, is there any way to download to my phone (only) from the desktop app, or do I have to save in 'your music' or as a playlist in the desktop app, and then go to my phone to click download ?

Q3. Where are the downloaded files stored on my phone ? Is there an option to select where you want to save them ?

Q4. Where are the downloaded files stored on my desktop? Can I just delete these from that folder and spotify will update and recognise that they are not downloaded on the desktop anymore ?

Q5. If I want to download an individual album, can this only be done on the phone, whereas on the desktop it has to be added to a playlist (and therefore does not get added to 'your music')?

Q6. Once songs albums and playlists are downloaded on the phone, does spotify take care of organising the library properly, so it is easy to find things via different seach criteria such as track name,artist,genre,year etc etc?

Thanks

Paul

[Joe]

Hi. Let's see if I can answer your questions.

1. Yes.
2. No - you need to download on your mobile.
3. In internal storage by default. This page explains how to switch storage to SD card.
4. The cache locatiion is shown in preferences/advanced and is \users\username\appdata\local\spotify\storage\ by default. You can change this in preferences. Deleting app data isn't the best way to do things - spotify will redownload the missing music anyway. To remove downloaded music, simply toggle off the download switch for the relevant playlist.
5. Yes - only playlists can be downloaded in the desktop client.
6. Your library contains artist, album and song views and each view can be filtered to show downloads only. There is no quick way to filter or search genres or years - the search terms "genre:rock" and "year:1989-1991" work in the desktop client. I haven't tried these on android - too fiddly!

On a general note, there's a load of useful information in the help pages here. Just follow the Help link in the page footer. Enjoy Spotify 🙂