Songs are not being added to playlists

[OpusMagnum]

Plan

Premium

Country

UK

Device

PC

Operating System

Windows 7

My Question or Issue

This is a new issue for me this past week.

When I select songs in one of my playlists, and right click and add them to another of my playlists, a pop up appears at the bottom saying "Added to Playlist".
If I then go to the target playlist the songs are not there.

If I add them, and them add them again immediately after the "Added to Playlist" popup goes away, then they do end up in the playlist. (If I add them again a third time it tells me they are already in as expected).

This impacts my daily workflow as I have "to listen to" playlists and "listening to" playlists which I move songs between every day. Moving songs used to be easy as I would cut and paste but you removed that feature a while ago (a "move to playlist" would be nice) and so now I have to use add, and then delete, but as the adding doesn't work I've recently ended up having to go back to my "to listen to" playlist that I just removed the album from, press Ctrl+Z to undo the deletion, scroll to where the album was (hard to find...) then add again multiple times then delete again.

[Amay · Accepted solution]

Hey there! Thanks for asking in the community.

Just to double-check, a new update to the Desktop App is pushed which tends to solve this issue. Can you please update your Desktop App and let us know if you are still experiencing the issue or is it fixed? You can refer to this guide for updating the App. If you have installed from the Microsoft Store then you can check for updates in the Store itself.

[OpusMagnum]

Hi, thanks for getting back to me.
I did a clean re-install rather than an update as I have another issue at the same time.
I have not been able to reproduce this problem.
Thanks!

[MafeG]

Hi @OpusMagnum,

Thanks for letting us know that everything is working fine now.

Remember to always keep your app updated, so you don't miss any fixes or new features. Don't hesitate to give us a shout if you have more questions.

Have a great day!

[OpusMagnum]

I am afraid this started happening again.

It may have been the clean install that reset things rather than a fix in the updated version

[Alex]

Hey @OpusMagnum,

Thanks for letting us know.

Can you tell us what version of the Desktop app you're running now and if you can add song by dragging them over to a playlist?

Looking forward to your reply.

[OpusMagnum]

Thanks for getting back to me.

I'm on 1.1.74.631

Dragging and dropping also causes the problem.

What I am wanting to do is move songs from one playlist to another, which means adding until they are added, then removing. Normally drag and drop operations are a move.

[Alex]

Hey @OpusMagnum,

Thanks for the reply.

Can you let us know if this is happening only when you drag song over to a specific playlist or every playlist?

It will be great if you can create a video recording of the issue and attach it with you next reply, either as an attachment or as a link.

Note that issues like this may occur if you have a very large library with more than 10, 000 items.

This will help us look into the matter further.

[OpusMagnum]

Hi @Alex,
It doesn't matter which playlist it is - tiny or large,
But it does not happen every time either.
Usually it happens, then it stops happening for a while.
But it seems like it always happens the first time I try every day (at the very least). 

Can I ask what you mean by library? Sorry, silly question, but Is that the total number of songs in all playlists?
I don't have local files included at all if that info helps.

I am usually working at that point so I have been quite a while being able to catch it in action when not working (my partner plays spotify on the tv at weekends you see).
I also took a bit of time to find software I could record with.
I put it in a .zip as with .mp4 I got an error ("I do not have permissions to upload video".)

Thanks,
~Tony

[Kiril]

Hey there @OpusMagnum,

Thanks for your reply and the time invested to make a video.

In this case could we ask you to upload the video file on another suitable video platform and just share us the link to it. We're still unable to accurately replicate the situation and your example would be of great help for us to give you a better advice. 

To address your other question: Your Library is comprised from the total amount of titles/albums that are saved in your Liked songs and the the ones in playlists you've created or followed. If the total amount is considerably large, such situations might occur as @Alex already pointed out. Hope this helps clarify things and do not hesitate to ask more questions if need be.

Keep us posted, we'll be on the lookout for your reply.

[OpusMagnum]

Hi Kiril,

The video is attached to my previous comment - it just has to be unzipped - Sorry for the confusion, I was just explaining why I zipped it up.

Thank you for answering my question about my library.
In that case my library does have more than 10,000 songs.

I know that there is (or was) a 10,000 song limit on individual playlists as I discovered from my liked songs (also how I learned that that was implemented internally as a playlist).

It's still only about 5% of the songs I listened to regularly before I started using Spotify so I am surprised that 10,000 is considered very large for the entire library. I don't know how Spotify implements playlists and libraries but if a 64 bit identifier were used for every song a 10000 song library would be < 20 kb + playlist metadata.

[Alex]

Hi @OpusMagnum,

Thanks for the reply.

A library with more than 10,000 items might cause issues like the one you're experiencing on some devices, as it takes the system more time to account for changes made on user side. Especially on older machines. I see in your original post that you're running Windows 7, which could also be part of the issue, as support for the OS was discontinued by Microsoft in 2020.

Unfortunately we don't have the option to unzip files for security reasons, so it would be great if you can upload the video to YouTube and send us a link. This will help us investigate further.

What you can try for a few days is to create a new free account and log in with that. Try adding and removing songs from some playlists and check if the issue is present on that account. This will help us understand if it has anything to do with the large library on your primary account.

Keep us posted on how you get on.

[OpusMagnum]

Hi Alex,

Thanks for getting back to me.

I don't understand why the system should take any significant amount of time to account for changes in playlist content, even if it is a client server synchronisation.
The data quantity should be trivial compared to the audio itself, especially as this happens when moving playlists with 10 songs in them! (for 10000 songs <20kb if using 64 bit ids, 2MB if each song is unfortunately a 200 byte json object).
Unless Spotify is updating one playlist by sending the entire contents of all playlists and failing to recieve confirmation of the sync with the server within a timeout, but that would surprise me.
Even then, diffs could be used, amounting to peanuts of network traffic, and the local client version of the playlists should be updated and use-able on the client that made the change without any network round-trip eitherway.

---

In my first post I pointed out that the issue was new to me on the week I raised the issue.
I have had over 10,000 songs for all the years I have used Spotify.

I am almost entirely moving songs between playlists rather than adding new songs to that total.
It's odd, I know, but I have "to listen to" lists and work through them.

So this problem was not introduced by my song list increasing dramatically in size.
It was also very unlikely to be caused by an OS or system change, as I don't get system updates as you pointed out, and my SSD is 1.5 years old and in good health. It has plenty of empty space, and I hadn't made any other system changes or installed new software.
The only other things that update regularly like Spotify are Chrome (and less frequently as I rarely open it, Steam).

What did change, was the Spotify software. Spotify updated, and then this bug started occurring.

---

I was able to upload the video to Google drive:

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1FasjdwvRY56zS_WigaK7DElA5bt-adER/view?usp=sharing

----

I will try a free account, but as this issue occurs every now and again, It might take me time to use it enough to see whether it is happening or not.
I wont be listening to Spotify with ads while working, for example, which is all of my weekday listening.

[Ver]

Hey @OpusMagnum,

Thanks for getting back to us.

Spotify is actually syncing up playlist data between you and server side and this includes things like follows, likes, sorting, individual track plays and more. There's also a bandwidth limit, so processing this on large playlists with thousands of songs is known to cause sync and data processing issues.

We are continuously optimizing the app, but these changes take time and issues like the described are currently expected for these extreme power-use scenarios.

There are many factors at play here, but as your collection grows so does that of millions of other users and as such the overall data processing requirement, which is why the issue might've developed gradually. Your account shares resources and infrastructure and Spotify also shares said infrastructure with other service providers, so caps can be dynamically implemented and then removed as resources and bandwidth allows, which would explain the intermittent nature of the issue.

Overall, this is a question of capacity, that we cannot expand indefinitely and immediately, even though we are continuously working on said optimizations, so we hope for your understanding.