How can I shuffle both Local Files and Songs?

[jhclouse]

Under the "Your Music" section, there is "Songs," which lists every track whose big "+" button I've clicked.

Fine.

There's also a "Local Files" tab which pulled in everything I've bought on the iTunes Store.

Also good.

But I want to drag files from Local Files into Songs so that I can shuffle between both. Some of the tracks I've bought on iTunes Store aren't available on Spotify, so this would help supplement the library. I can drag the files from Local Files onto Songs, and a drag'n'drop icon appears (implying that I can copy them to Songs) but they don't appear there.

I know I can create a playlist and drag tracks to it from both Local Files and Songs. But then if I add more tracks to Songs, they won't automatically appear in the combined playlist. I literally want to be able to shuffle every possible track from Spotify and iTunes all in one go, and without constantly putting in effort to keep them synced up.

That would seem to be an obvious use case, given the strange absence of some pretty essential stuff from Spotify's library.

It would also be nice if Spotify didn't import podcasts and audiobooks from iTunes. It's a music app. There's no need for that. But that's a minor complaint.

EDIT: By the way, I'm posting this here instead of adding it as a feature request because I'm not entirely sure that there isn't a way to do it already. I've seen plenty of posts about Local Files that seem to imply this use case is already supported. But the language is rather vague.

[Peter__]

Local files are not currently supported in the Your Music system which is why you can't add them to the songs tab (unless they are matched to a track in the Spotify catalogue).

For local files, playlists are your only option at the minute.

[jhclouse]

That's really annoying. There needs to be a way to aggregate everything quickly and easily (not to mention slicing'n'dicing on various criteria and building ad-hoc aggregates that way). At the very least, stuff like this makes Spotify difficult for a new user to jump into and understand.

The implication of "Songs" under "My Music" is that it's a list of everything (local, streamed, playlists, etc.). That's the assumption I made, but now that I've hit an invisible and confusing 10,000 track limit in "Songs," I realize that this feature was never meant to be used for anything serious. If I want more than 10,000 tracks saved, I need to go through the laborious task of creating dozens or hundreds of playlists and sorting through everything manually.

And doing things manually that computers are much better at doing is not why I use computers.

[codebeta]

I'd love to have the same functionality as the OP. Currently have them on a playlist together so I can shuffle between them on my iPhone as I used the Starred function before and now wanted to use the Songs function but this limitation does cause a drawback.

[greatbritain89]

Hi all,

Creating a 'tack' playlist and just want to ask, does anyone know how to add local files into playlists? I have a song that's not on Spotify but DEFINITELY needs to be on my playlist. Any ideas would be awesome 🙂

[MattSuda]

@greatbritain89 

Drag and drop support for local files is not supprted in the new version.
Spotify plans to bring some features back, but it is currently not known if the feature you mentioned will be coming back.

You can still add local files to Spotify. Go into the settings and under "Local Files" you can import the source folder that contains the local files.

After you do that, the local files will appear in the "Local Files" section.

Find the song and then drag it over to a playlist.

[greatbritain89]

Mattsuda, you are a superstar!

Thanks for clarifying this. I was a little confused about how to ask the question and how to navigate the boards but you've been a superstar by helping me out. Give yourself plenty of kudos for this!

Cheers,

A

[nonstopski]

Is there any work around to gettting local files (that are also streamable on Spotify into the "My Music" songs category easily then? I know this used to be possible. 

Can I download an old version of spotify, uninstall the newest, use the old version, drag my local files to "songs," let that sync, and then uninstall the old version and install the latest version? 

[valcanaia]

Any update on this issue?