Can't add a local folder on Linux

[hayleox]

Plan: Premium

Country: United States

Device: custom-built PC (Intel i7-12700K, RTX 3060, 64GB of RAM, using an external DAC for sound: Fosi Audio K5 Pro)

Operating System

• Ubuntu 22.04.4 LTS (Linux kernel 6.5.0-28-generic)
• KDE Plasma 5.24.7 running on X11
• Spotify version 1.2.31.1205.g4d59ad7c (installed via Debian repository)
  

My Question or Issue

I can't seem to add a directory for local files on the Spotify desktop app. I go to the app's settings, enable "Show Local Files", click "Add a source", select a folder which has some mp3s in it, and click "Upload". Nothing seems to happen, and I can't find any of my local songs in Spotify. I poked around in ~/.config/spotify, and I don't see any references to my chosen folder path in either of the two prefs files or in local-files.bnk (examined using a hex editor).

When I run spotify via terminal, there are no messages printed to the terminal at all. If I run spotify --show-console, there is some output, but nothing that appears to be relevant to local files, as nothing appears when I attempt to add a source.

Per this post, I have ensured that zenity is installed; sudo apt install zenity shows that it is already installed.

[hayleox · Accepted solution]

I found the solution myself. The critical error message appeared when running spotify --show-console:

14:18:25.317 E [f:564 ] FileSystemMonitorLinux() failed [inotify_init()]

I then found this thread which explained that the likely cause was that the system limit on the total number of inotify instances was being reached. The default limit is 128 (on my system anyway); you can increase it with this command:

 echo 8192 | sudo tee /proc/sys/fs/inotify/max_user_instances

 Once I ran that command and started Spotify, local files worked no problem.