Miscellaneous Imported Itunes tracks greyed out

[forkys]

This is the situation: I imported songs into iTunes from an old  CD called "10cc Greatest Hits And More". Everything runs in iTunes, clean as a whistle. I created an iTunes  playlist named 10CC with only songs from this CD.

I imported this playlist called 10CC into Spotify. So far so good but then things start to go wrong for reasons byond me.

In Spotify some songs are greyed out, some are not. They are all from the same source, the track files (.m4a format) are all in the same iTunes Media folder location, yet some do play in Spotify, others (greyed out) do not- when selecting it says "this track was added as a local file, if you have the file on your computer you can import it". How do I do this "importing this file" into Spotify???

Doesn't make any sense for ALL the (track) files are effectively on my computer.

Why is it that Spotify (apparantly) randomly ignores or doesn't seem to recognise tracks from one and the same CD, tracks which have similar format and are stored in a similar folder location on my PC? 

More important how to resolve?

[user-removed]

Here lets try this, select all songs that are in the desktop app Local Files location that are associated with 10CC playlist, once all songs are highlighted right click and choose Unlink Track, now what happens? Do they play?

[forkys]

There's nothing shown under  Your Music/ Local Files. Empty

[user-removed]

Ahh ok well then go to where those files are at in your system and drag and drop them into the Local Files under Your Music, you might want to just remove the imported iTunes playlist first or you might end up with double listings of songs. Seems something odd happened when you imported that iTunes playlist, there could be many factors of why to the Music folder on your system got out of synch or spotify just did not deal with the iTunes playlist which I believe is an m3u file right? spoitfy just did not work well with it correctly, I gave up on setting up new iTunes playlists and just loaded in the full albums that way for my iTunes library. I have done it too many times and it was just quicker to load my full music folder into iTunes and adjust and edit that way instead of setting up playlists for everything.

Anyway the quickest way is just to remove the imported iTunes playlist of those music files, first though locate those same music files on your system whichever folder they are located at. Then open up the Local Files under Your Music in the desktop app and just drag and drop those music files from the folder location into Local Files in the app and they will populate from the correct folder location in your system and be there in the desktop app as well. And see how the desktop app responds to them being added that way. I sometimes have to use the Unlink Track option in the right click context menu if any local files do not play afterwards, even after dragging and dropping music files.

Shout out again if the linking acts up. There are Idea suggestions to make better support available for Local Files in the desktop app. Hope this helps sometimes local music files in the app can be somewhat of a pain.

[forkys]

Thanks,

Not sure if I got it right. There are obviuosly more imported playlists (with the same problem).  So this is my understanding: delete all imported playlists from Spotify- next locate the iTunes Music folder(s) on the hard drive- select all files and drop them in My Music/Local Files on Spotify. Right?

But then how do I replicate (or import) my iTunes playlists in Spotify?

Another thing -I'm also running the Spotify app on iphone- having all these music files in Spotify desktop app  My Music/Local - would it mean when syncing that all those files will be copied to my iphone HD ? Which would mean I've got 2 copies of each track on my Phone, the normal iTunes Music one and the Spotify one- not sure if this is something I facy, albeit I do have 60G iPhone.

[user-removed · Accepted solution]

Ok I thought this was going to be an easy post, but the more I thought about your issue with imported iTunes playlists and unplayable songs the more I realized there was different ways to attack this issue.

Since you have more than one imported iTunes playlist with this problem, I would just remove all of the iTunes playlists with serious track playing issues, and then just add the local music files manually into the desktop app. That is what I do, I add all my local music tracks manually dragging and dropping, and it is the easiest way to control things, as you can adjust each album loaded into the Local Files folder individually in the desktop app. Doing this manually also allows you to make sure that spotify is not over writing the linking, as spotify when you add local files and or import playlists looks in the spotify service and tries to link tracks with what is in the service with what you add locally, sometimes it does this correct sometimes this fails. Since you loaded in iTunes playlists, the spotify app probable attempted to link all those track names with what is in the spotify service and things probable got kind of messed up, not your fault just that the app try to automate this for you and failed horrible, and media programs never run that smooth. And so anything unplayable in those playlists the app is asking you to find the track locally, so you can add it and link it correctly to the song in the iTunes imported playlist. Since many playlists have this issue there is a few ways to go about this and it just depends on how you wish to do it.

These are you options and all of them will probable take some time to straighten this issue out for you, no matter which way you decide to go. So here they are your options are:

1 - Remove all imported iTunes playlists and then manually add each album or song in batches, I would say maybe a few at a time somewhere of 40-50 songs and see how the app chooses to deal with the tracks and how many of those local files spotify locates in the service and tries to link. If the spotify service is linking a good chunk of what you are adding locally, you might just want to use the spotify service music tracks until they no longer become available and just use your local files for backup and replacement for when they get pulled from the spotify service, which does happen often. I have playlists like this a mix of spotify available tracks and local tracks of missing music to me in the spotify service.

2 - Remove all imported iTunes playlists and then you can choose to use the option in the app Preferences to search your Hard Drive for local music files. You can do this by going to upper left corner click on Edit and click on the Preferences which is at the bottom of the context window, when in preferences scroll down to Local Files and select whatever music resources you want spotify to search for on your system. Windows Music Library, Downloads, Windows Media Player, iTunes, and you can also select Add Source. Say you have a networked hard drive connected via USB to a home router network system for your music and movie files, you can select one or all of these options depending on what you have on your system. Just note the spotify app will attempt to search the service and link tracks with what it thinks is available in the spotify service, sometimes this works, sometimes it chooses the next best closest thing, the worse case it messes up on random tracks and the links where the local files again won't play until one uses the Unlink Track option in the right click context menu whenever a spotify track fails to play.

3 - Go through each and every iTunes playlist you imported into the spotify desktop app, and highlight each song that does not play, you will have to do this one at a time for each song that does not play and go through all those songs from the imported iTunes playlists and when the app instructs you to look for the song on your system to import when trying to play or looking at metadata track information, that is exactly what you will have to do and add each and every song that won't play or when the app asks you to search for it to be added so that the app can link it correctly with the playlist as something broke the link to it.

4 - Another option the easiest and quickest without pulling your hair or nails out over this. Remove all imported iTunes playlists and include no local files in the spotify app. Since you have a 60 gig iphone you can still use your iPhone to synch iTunes content with those already created playlists whenever you choose to. You can also use the spotify app on your iPhone to play spotify content you want, find, and like. I did this with my android for some time when I first had it. Since the android kitkat 4.0 plays iTunes .m4a files now, I just loaded iTunes music files manually in my external card with what I wanted and used the android music player and also used the spotify app and switched back and forth as my needs suited me. Was not too hard once things where loaded up to switch back and forth or run one service at a time until finsihed with what I was listening to and then switch over to the other app for something different.

Sorry this took so long, I hope I did not make this a confusing mess if I did shout out and I will try to simplify it as best I can.

[forkys]

Thanks you very much for the time and effort you put in advising possible solutions! That's absolute first class and very much appreciated.

Tomorrow I'lll take a closer look at the options and will revert back.

Again thanks for now.

Brgds

[forkys]

Good morning.

Being kind of lazy during the weekend, not wishing having to go through all the manual work of option1 and 3, I decided to pursue option 2.

Amazingly this did the trick.  After deleting the previously imported Itunes playlistst, the Local Files folder was apparently  automatically populated by Spotify. Not sure if this happened after I hit Import Itunes playlist option again or before.... I missed that but does it really matter now that I have  a result?

Funy thing is that, although some tracks are still being greyed-out in the imported Playlists, hitting the enter makes them play anyway. Basically each imported Playlist track is playing. The funny thing is that, returning to my 10CC playlist containing songs from a single CD, everything plays nicely but for some tracks Spotify uses different Artwork than the Itunes one, for others however it uses the iTunes artwork.

Not that I understand it but it works anyway.

Final request: is it possible to create a new Playlist in Spotify which combines a chosen imported iTunes playlist with a genuine, Spotify songs created playlist? It's an option as offered by Sonos offering  great flexibility.

That would be lovely

Many thanks!

[user-removed]

"Final request: is it possible to create a new Playlist in Spotify which combines a chosen imported iTunes playlist with a genuine, Spotify songs created playlist? It's an option as offered by Sonos offering  great flexibility."

That I do not know as I kind of always avoided trying to mix iTunes playlists into the spotify app, and since I dont have any iTunes playlists on this Windows 8 machine it was not necessary to go that way, so I just drag and drop when I need to add something spotify doesn't have. The spotify app does fine except for minor issues when adding local music content, but different media programs tend to have issues with each other, everything is just slightly different and a user ends up editing anyway in the end depending on what they are using.

To fix the tracks that are showing different artwork if you highlight that track and right click and choose the unlink option does it now display the correct artwork? The spotify service probable linked it with something in the music catalogue. To be able to tell this all local music files will be a darker greyed color that are not linked with anything in the spotify service and any local music files linked to something else in the spotify service will be white and you can click on them to take you to what they are linked to usually to an album release by that artist in the spotify service. Play around with it you will eventually see what is linked with local content and you will be then able to decide which sources to use and adjust to what you want, and see what you might not have.

So it is like this all local content not linked to anything in the spotify service will be greyed out, local content that is linked with something in the spotify service will turn white and be clickable just like a web link since the spotify service uses web elements as well. Local content files that turn white in the spotify app can be unlinked so they play from your local music source files and be relinked again with what is in the spotify service, so note here all local content files that turn white they are really playing spotify content and not the local music file content. So local content that does not link with anything in the spotify service greys out as it is not available in the service currently. Local content that turns white and is clickable has content available in the service for those artists. A little confusing but makes sense when you see that when spotify content that was available was white and could be played and then it became not availble and well it greys out to let users know that it is not available anymore. Enjoy and have fun. 🙂

[Mori910]

I've got this when viewing my Local Files. They all play fine so I'm not worried. One thing that I think produces this is that the version in Local is not in Spotify - for example, I have most of Pink Floyd in Local, some albums are greyed out (Division Bell & Animals are the ones I've noticed). They are CDs a few years old. In spotify, those albums are 2011 remasters, so effectively my local edition isn't in Spotify. 

Does that help?

[EDIT] This is probably what causes the greying to happen - why they are different versions and how to fix it is a different matter. I would suspect the iTunes playlists reference a version that is not the same as Spotify uses.