Spotify Connect/Cast is Broken, Can't Switch Devices Without Losing Queue

[jdtemple]

Plan

Premium

Country

United States

Device

Pixel Fold

Operating System

Windows 11 Pro

My Question or Issue

Spotify Connect and Cast is broken on Android.

The issues I have seen in the past is what led me to switch to YouTube Music for a period of time, but that's bad in its own special way. My family voted me out so I had to switch us all back to Spotify.

1. If I am casting to a speaker (Google Home), and switch the playback device back to my phone via the Android app, playback stops and my queue disappears.

2. If I am playing on my PC, and I switch the playback device from my PC to my phone via the Android app, playback stops and my queue disappears. Spotify just shows some toast about being unable to play that track, but it's not track specific, it's any track. I have 22,000+ tracks in my library to choose from, and I have tried many.

3. If I am playing on my PC, and I switch the playback device from my PC to my phone via the Windows app, a whole new queue loads up and begins playing back on my phone. The queue I had on my PC is discarded and replaced with whatever queue my phone generated out of thin air.

4. If I am playing on my phone and I switch the the playback device from my Phone to my PC via the Android app, a whole new queue loads up and begins playing back on my PC. The queue I had on my phone is discarded and replaced with whatever queue my PC generated out of thin air.

Please do not suggest a clean install. I haven't had Spotify installed on anything for months, this is about as clean as you can get. Everything was installed fresh yesterday.

[fcazabon]

Plan

Premium

Country

Trinidad and Tobago

Device

Windows laptop, Android Phone

Operating System

Windows 11 Pro, Android 13 TKQ1.221013.002

My Question or Issue

I'm always moving from my Phone to my desktop (and to my smart TV) and want my music to follow me. So far it works fine When I leave my laptop, I switch to my phone by "connect to a device" and the song playing on my laptop continues on my Phone and vice versa. However, in the last couple days this has stopped working. If I'm listening to a playlist, the playlist starts back at the first song when I do this. 

I've tried going offline on all the devices, logging off all the devices, forgetting the device but none has helped.

Any ideas?

[Vasil]

Hey @fcazabon,

Thanks for reaching out!

Try removing the app's cached data on your mobile device. In case this doesn't help out, do the same for your desktop app.

If the issue persists, in the same order, do a complete clean reinstall of both apps. Check if there's a difference before moving to the second device.

Should the issue persist, let us know the scenarios in which using the Connect function is restarting your playlist:

• Desktop -> Mobile
• Desktop -> TV
• Mobile -> Desktop
• Mobile -> TV
• TV - Desktop
• TV -> Mobile

Many thanks! We'll be on the lookout for your reply 🙂

[fcazabon]

Thanks for the response. I have tried other playlists and albums and it works as expected. It seems to be only this long playlist that I have (basically all my liked songs which is 1100 odd songs). It happens when going from computer to mobile and mobile to computer. When I get a chance I'll try it on the TV and see what happens.

[Vasil]

Hey again @fcazabon,

Thanks for the info!

If the issue remains even after performing the troubleshooting steps, you could also copy your Liked Songs into two separate playlists as a workaround.
This can most easily be done via the desktop app by going to Liked Songs -> selecting a song (left click) -> scrolling to the final song of the selection and selecting it while holding the Shift button. This will mark the entire span of songs in-between.

Hope this helps out 🙂

[Yordan]

Hi there @jdtemple,

Thanks for reaching out!

Does this happen with a specific playlist, for example Liked Songs? You can also try unlinking your Spotify account from your Google speaker and linking it again using these steps.

If the issue persists, it would be helpful if you can send a screen recording or screenshots of what you see on your end. If the screen recording file is too large to attach, you can upload it to Google Drive (make sure to allow general access to the file) or as an unlisted YouTube video.

Looking forward to your response.

[jdtemple]

Liked songs is what I'm using, yes. I generally stick to that for daily use, and don't use other playlists much at all.

I'm just now coming back to Spotify after pausing my accoount for a while to give another service a try. So, to be clear, this is a fresh setup. When I posted this, I had only been using Spotify for a day.

Your instructions to link Spotify to Google are out of date. Step 4 says:
"Back on the home screen, tap + in the top-left, then Music and audio"

There is no + button in the top left of Google Home, the button up there shows the name of your home, and allows you to toggle home or away.

I have set Spotify as the default music player on my phone, and disabled YouTube Music. Spotify is currently the only active music player on my phone.

My Google and Spotify accounts are linked as expected.

After some additional testing, the problem seems to be intermittent, and with the Liked Songs playlist, which is very large.

Smaller playlists don't seem to have these problems.

I used to make smaller, random playlists using my Liked Songs playlist as a source, but since you took away the ability to save the play queue to a playlist, that workflow is no longer available.

I have also put a feature suggestion in to bring that feature back.

So, I'm stuck trying to shuffle a 22,000 song playlist and cross my fingers for continuity between devices so I don't have to re-shuffle as a move from device to device and deal with repetitive song queues.

[Eni]

Hey there @jdtemple, 

Thanks for getting back to us. 

Would you mind giving a different internet connection a go to see if the same happens? You can try creating a hotspot on your phone and using that. 

On another note, keep in mind that having large playlists might affect the app's performance. In this case, we suggest that you try splitting your Liked songs into smaller playlists. 

Keep us posted on how it goes. 

[jdtemple]

A different internet connection isn't really an option. The issue is reproduced between my phone, and a hard-wired PC. I can't use my phone as a hotspot for the PC, nor does it make sense to use the phone as the hotspot when the phone is part of the reproduction steps for the bugs.

[jdtemple]

"On another note, keep in mind that having large playlists might affect the app's performance. In this case, we suggest that you try splitting your Liked songs into smaller playlists."

I can't do this, and keep my library playing on shuffle, because you all took away the ability to save my queue as a playlist.

I used to:

shuffle my liked songs
save as a playlist (this feature has been removed, and has been gone for a while, I started another thread about that)

repeat until that playlist had 1000-2000 songs with no duplicates

when that playlist gets stale, do it again and replace the original playlist

This is no longer possible.

To break my liked songs up into smaller playlists would mean each playlist is now an ordered set of songs.

I have 22,000 liked songs, so at 1000 songs per playlist, that's 22 playlists.

How do you propose I create the playlists, now that adding to a playlist from the queue is no longer available?

How would you propose I continue to get the same variety in my listening experience with 22 playlists to choose from, each of which are not shuffled songs, but an orderd list of songs, based on the limited sorting options you have in the like songs playlist?

[jdtemple]

I just tried another casting playback change that doesn't work.

Playback was initiated on my Android phone, and was then casted to a Nest speaker. No problems there.

I paused the music from my phone, booted up my PC, started Spotify on my PC, and it could see that I was connected to my Nest speaker. I clicked play, and playback resumed on the speaker. Then, via the PC app, I attempted to change playback from my Nest speaker to my PC , at which point I got the error about Spotify (on PC) being unable to play the song, like it didn't exist or something.

I forget the phrasing, It was suggesting that I was playing local media on my device that couldn't be found on the PC, and that's simply not the case. I stream everything (again, because I can't create playlists from queues any more).

[Maria]

Hey @jdtemple,

Thanks for all additional info and kudos for the troubleshooting you've tried!

We've forwarded the details you provided to our tech folks, so that they can have a look as well. While we can't give you a specific time frame, we recommend keeping the app up-to-date in the meantime. We'll keep you posted here if we have any news to share.

Should anything else appear, we're just a post away.

Cheers!

[jdtemple]

Here is some more information. The attached screenshots show what happens when I have music playing on my phone and try to switch playback to my PC. This is for very large playlists (my liked songs, for example). Once this error occurs, Spotify on my PC no longer displays the currently playing track from my phone, and playback simply continues on my phone.

If I leave it alone, a few minutes later, Spotify on my PC reconnects with my phone and the currently playing track is displayed, but moving playback from my phone to my PC is still not possible.

[jdtemple]

More info. I also noticed that when you cast from your phone to a device and back, Spotify completely rebuilds the entire song queue, with different songs from the liked song list. The queue is completely replaced when you cast, and again when you go back to the phone as the playback device.

After a couple rounds of replicating this, casting quit working completely, despite rebooting my phone and all audio casting devices on my network. Spotify even went so far as to tell me that I no longer had internet access, which was false.

I ended up casting the audio from my phone to a speaker via the Android OS, which isn't ideal due to the extremely reduced audio quality.

[jdtemple]

added last screenshot

[jdtemple]

I made a couple screen recordings. Here's a shorter one that shows how casting and device switching happens fairly seamlessly when dealing with smaller playlists. I am not seeing finger taps in the videos, so apologies for that. But this video shows me switching between playing on the phone, casting to Chromecast device, and switching back. The change is farily quick, and the play queue is not mutated. This is the expected behavior.

https://photos.app.goo.gl/QDfiW9RMsJ1UNY7Z9


This is the same experience when shuffling a large playlist, or in my case, my liked songs. It's terrible. If it doesn't stop playback completely during the switch, it swaps out your play queue with something completely different. It is so slow and buggy it took me 3 minutes to do what I did in 58 seconds in the previous video.

https://photos.app.goo.gl/P3rLvDmriTPKyZm58

[HyphenSam]

I'm getting the same issue. When switching devices, the queue resets to the start when I first start playing the playlist on shuffle mode. Still no fix yet?

[gbai]

Plan

Premium

Country

Spain

Device

POCO X3 NFC

Operating System

MIUI 14

My Question or Issue

When playing my Liked Songs playlist at first everything works fine and I can switch between playing on my phone and my computer and the queue is synced between those two devices. But after like 100~ songs when playing for example through my computer if I try to switch and listen through my phone the current song resets to the beginning and after it ends the queue resets and starts with the first song of my Liked Songs playlist.
If I copy all the songs from that playlist to a new one that problem doesn't happen and everything works fine, it just happens when playing my Liked Songs.

I have tried reinstalling Spotify both on my phone and on my computer, a clean install, turning offline mode off and on and signing out everywhere but so far nothing has worked.

I have also noticed that if I compare the queue from the desktop app, web app and android app, the desktop app and web app are synced but the android app isn't.

[Gharial23]

Plan

Premium

Country

United States

Device

(iPhone 13, Desktop)

Operating System

(iOS 18.0.1, Windows 11)

My Question or Issue

Hello! Starting this last weekend (October 12th/13th), I've noticed that whenever I connect devices to transfer my current queue between the two like I've always done, instead of the queue updating and keeping me where I was at, it instead takes the current song I'm listening to and drags it all the way back to the start of the queue. This goes both ways for connecting from my phone to my computer and vice versa. I've already tried uninstalling and reinstalling, signing out, messing with the shuffle and loop settings, but nothing seems to be working. I'm hoping it's just an issue with versions.

[groupama3]

This is pretty frustrating when I'm a few weeks in to a 10,000 track playlist. I switch devices, and it starts back at the beginning, if not for last.fm I'd have no idea where i was in the playlist. Please fix, thanks