Ubuntu: This song is not available [Blue Bar]

[tadiou]

I know there's been issues i/r/t "This song is not available." on windows. Problem is: I'm on Ubuntu.

What I've done: Cleared storage cache, reinstalled, made sure I had the latest updated client, and still nothing.

Song works just fine on web client. 

[jooon]

Which song is it? Right click on it to get a context menu, select copy link and paste it here.

[tadiou]

From This album: https://open.spotify.com/album/0lUmhvC9JtPpU8LEYHVdyS only Tracks 2 & 4 don't throw errors.

From this album: https://open.spotify.com/album/4enPQLBdrmgyL6NwrMZXx1, only the last track (track 12) doesn't throw an error.

The rest do.

[jooon]

I can't see anything wrong with those tracks.

The only thing I can think of is that you have those albums as local files on your computer and you have told Spotify to scan your local music files. Spotify has found those local files and tried to match them against the tracks on the equivalent Spotify albums. It has failed to match track 2 and 4 of the first album (probably because of the non-alphabetic characters) and track 12 on the last album (maybe the track name is spelled slightly differently). When you tell Spotify to play a spotify track, but it has matched that to a local file, it will play the file instead. If it can't play that file, it will not fall back on the spotify track and there will be an error. There probably is no specific error message for this kind of error, so instead Spotify just gives you a generic error message. Since it failed to match a few tracks, you can play those.

Does this make any sense?

[tadiou]

That actually does make sense, because I know I have those albums ripped on my computer (and it only started happening after I tried to use Spotify as a replacement for Banshee for my local files).

But, after I clear out my .cache/Spotify folder, these still remain, and there isn't a way for me to remove them.

I open the context menu, try to remove from my music, and it doesn't remove, in the settings page, there's

not any sources for me to add or remove.

It's just 'stuck', and I'm not entirely sure how to remove them via the gui. 

I get that not having them spelled the same would cause issues (and prioritize local over remote). But that seems eh in design that it wouldn't fallback to remote play in the instance that it exists. It's always easier to say, than to do, but, to me, that'd make sense during the opening service to check local, check remote, then fail, instead of check local because it's noted in DB, can't find one that matches remote name locally, fail.

Either way: what'd be the kind of solution to get these songs out of the local files?

[jooon · Accepted solution]

Ok, there seems to be a lot of bugs interacting here.

1. Spotify on Linux can not play local files on modern Linux desktop environments. You need older versions of libavcodec/libavformat/libavutil installed that are no longer shipped.

2. Spotify on Linux (probably other platforms too) has a bad error message when it tries to play local files and fails.

3. Spotify on desktop (and some mobile clients) sometimes matches local files incorrectly.

4. Spotify on Linux (and maybe other platforms too) can apparantly get into an inconsistent state with the settings and have local files indexed as seen in the local files section, but without the directories scanned showing up in settings.

Not falling back is probably on purpose, but the decision probably did not anticipate the usecase when no file is playable, especially considering the error message is so generic.

I would remove not only .cache/Spotify, but .config/Spotify too.

[steniogalvao]

I was with the same problem I guess, and delete ./config/spotify and ./cache/spotify works for me, now the songs that use to show the blue bar with that annoying message has gone

Thank you

I realize that my computer with ubuntu is not listed on "offline devices" just that ones with android and windows

[rakelwb]

I had the same problem, many songs were not working on the Ubuntu desktop app. I tried everything! Finally found a fix: I played a song that normally wouldn't work on my desktop on my phone and it played there, I then tried playing it on the desktop and it worked! And all the other songs that weren't working now work as well.