Local files replacing streamed versions

[czarship]

I've noticed a bug that still hasn't been fixed in the 2 years I've been using Spotify.

When I drag live versions of songs by an artist into Spotify, they replace all the album versions of the songs with the same name, even on the artist page. Even with all "Local Files" checkboxes disabled in the Prefences menu, I can no longer listen to the streaming, album versions of songs in Spotify that I've added live versions for.

I assumed that removing the local files would force Spotify to revert to the streamed version of each effected track, but this is not the case. Instead, Spotify stops playback whenever it hits one of these tracks in a playlist as if searching for the local file. I've tried relaunching Spotify and rebooting my computer, but to no avail. The only thing that works is uninstalling and reinstalling Spotify.

I'd love to be able to listen to both the album version (streamed from spotify) and live versions (via local file) of the same song, but this appears to be impossible still. I have a premium account running version 0.9.11.27.g2b1a638c on Windows 8.1, though I notice the same behavior on my work computer, which is running Windows 7.

Am I missing something or is this a longstanding bug?

[Joe · Accepted solution]

Removing the local file sources should work fine but it sounds like you need to unlink the tracks first. Select all the tracks and unlink them from the context menu and they should then play from the spotify database. Have you made sure that your local file metadata is accurate to differentiate between studio and live recordings by the way?

[czarship]

I haven't noticed the unlink feature before, thank you for pointing that out. I don't need to change the names of my local files now to use both simulatinously.