Local files don't appear on my desktop app.

[BritPopZgz]

Plan

Family premium

Country

USA

Device

Dektop app

Operating System

Windows 10

My Question or Issue

No matter what I do, local files are not shown on my desktop app. I changed the preferences allowing local files and setting the music library folder, reinstalled, installed Quicktime, etc. The local files are empty, the app does not detect my mp3 songs.

[AdamDamon · Accepted solution]

Hi @BritPopZgz,

Thanks for posting in the Spotify Community! 

If the local files that don't show up on your desktop app have special characters (Non-ASCII) in their names, it’s likely that you’re experiencing an Ongoing Issue that Spotify is currently looking into. In this case, I would suggest adding your +VOTE to this Ongoing Issue as well as subscribing to it by clicking the three-dot menu next to its title, so that you can be sure to be informed of any relevant updates.

If your local files don’t have special characters (Non-ASCII) in their names, I would recommend first trying a clean reinstall of the app on your device; bear in mind that doing this will remove your downloads, though, such that you will need to re-download your playlists for offline listening. If a clean reinstall doesn’t resolve this issue, I would recommend deleting your local files cache by following the steps provided in this thread, then moving the files for the songs that you would like to import to a different folder on your computer, and then adding that folder as a source for your local files in the app settings (which you can read about in this Support article).

Let me know how it goes, as well as if you have any other questions.

Have a good day!

[BritPopZgz]

Moving the files to a different folder worked

[mlidbo]

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@BritPopZgz wrote:

Moving the files to a different folder worked

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I thought I hade the problem whipped by doing this. Then all the files disappeared a few seconds after the next time I restarted spotify. This happened again and again. The only way for me to get them to stay was to ensure the removal of the offending characters. For me I was lucky enough that it was just some special versions of a dash - and a quote ' . Things like that can be quite hard to spot though since they looked very similar to the standard versions of those characters.

Spotify really needs to fix this. 

And for crying out loud Spotify. Have you ever heard of automated testing? Any competent company should write tests when a bug like this appears the first time and then their builds would fail if they reintroduce it. What are you doing? How do you manage to reintroduce the same types of problem again and again without catching it in your QA process? Isn't it about freaking time that you started taking QA seriously instead of incurring the humongous work overhead of having to reiterate through getting angry feedback from your users?

This should have surfaced as a test failure for the developer that introduced the bug. Preferably the next time ran their local tests. If not that then when they tried to merge their change to the common branch. As a last ditch catch-all it should have been caught by a nightly run of slow integration tests. Not having a test for it at all in spite of it occurring several times before seems like pure short sighted negligence to me.