How does Spotify match my local music?

[boug99]

Hi, I just signed up for Spoitfy Premium to give it whirl. But I have some questions.

I have a somewhat large and highly organized music library in iTunes (on my Mac) and I've successfully imported all of my playlists and tracks into the desktop program. I guess what I'm confused about is how does Spotify match my track to a track in its cloud? For instance, of the 23k songs i have in iTunes, about 7800 have "matched" to the spotify version. So it appears I can stream the Spotify versions of these songs to my iphone, ipad, or my work computer. But most songs are still greyed out in my playlists when I use, say, my iPhone.

And I've noticed the number of tracks matching has changed in the last day since I signed up, does Spotify slowly match songs over time? Does my computer need to be open for this to happen? And what's up with the other 16k songs? They're mostly MP3s. Will they ever match to the Spotify version in the cloud? 

Its weird because I cannot seem to find very clear information on how Spotfy matches tracks in my iTunes library. My primary concern is that I have a ton of music in a ton of playlists already in iTunes and I don't want to have to manually hunt down each track to recreate them for the "cloud" version. I've imported my playlists and Spotify sees the local files, etc, etc. It all seems to be working but are most of my MP3 files going to eventually match to the cloud version and make my playlists whole automagically?

[Peter__]

Hey! Welcome to the community 🙂 

Normally the matching takes place pretty instantaneously, any changes you see won't be your client matching more tracks directly but more likely to be more matching due to content changing in the Spotify catalogue which is going on all the time. The matches are done based on the metadata of the tracks and to be honest I have found it works the majority of times but it is mysterious in the way it works, sometimes it does and sometimes it doesn't. 

You can however sync those local files you want to listen to into offline playlists onto your mobile devices such as your iPhone by following the steps here. 

Peter

[fairprod]

"To save more, you'll need to remove some songs" .... That's a very twisted logic, Spotify.

You do need to increase the limit. 10,000 is not acceptable for premium customers. And increase the offline limit too. 

[Jarik]

Hi! 

I'm having the same problem. The link in your comment redirects to nowhere. Could you help me with the right link?

Thanks.

J