Local files to "spotify" songs

[JavierVelez]

Hello. I'm new on Spotify. I have some questions.
I have always had my music on my Mac as local files and listened them on iTunes. And also I have always had an ipod to listen my music. Now I want to move to Spotify because I have a new phone that can finally run spotify.

I know I can listen to my local files on Spotify on my desktop app, I have no problem with that. My question is, can I add these songs to my Spotify playlist? I mean, is there any way that Spotify "identifies" my local files and add them to my music as songs from the spotify's servers? Because, when I see on my library "Local files", for example, I can't click on the artist name to listen to more music of this band (although I know Spotify had these bands on its catalogue). I don't know if I explained my question correctly.
Thanks a lot! I hope you can help me.

[Bittencourt]

Hi @JavierVelez, welcome to the community!

When we add local files to our devices, only we can listen to them. You can add them to any of your playlists, but other users won't be able to listen to them.

Let me know if you have any other questions 🙂

[DoIEvenMatter · Accepted solution]

Hey,

you can't. Spotify doesn't look for audio files on your mobile decive (at least not on Android), as it does on macOS. All of your iTunes songs you add to your playlists will be seen as "not available" on your other devices. However, you can still add the song from the Spotify library (if it exists).

[Loxer]

Hey @JavierVelez and welcome to the Community.

Hope you're doing great!

In addition to what @Bittencourt said I'd also recommend checking this article which explains how local files and matching those with songs on Spotify works.

Hope it helps 🙂

[Ergydion]

Hi @Loxer,
in other threads I've read that the "match local files to spotify catalogue" was removed. In the support thread you posted it says that spotify tries to match local files against the catalogue.  
Which of the two is true now? Was this feature (that never ever should have been removed) added back?  
To me it seems that it isn't working.

Any help is greatly appreciated

Edit. https://community.spotify.com/t5/Ongoing-Issues/Local-files-not-matching-with-Spotify-catalog/idi-p/...

[Guido]

Hey @Ergydion,

We do try to match local files to songs in Spotify. This may or may not work however. It highly depends on the file itself and where you got it from.

We've decided not to fix this so it works for all local files. Hopefully you don't mind manually looking up songs and adding them to one of your playlists.

Hope this clarifies some things. Let us know if you have further questions.

Have a nice day.