Spotify generating folders with files with extension "FILE"?

[TommyTucker]

Plan

Premium

Country

USA

Operating System

Windows 10 Pro

My Question or Issue

Apparently Spotify is generating folders in my music library folder that are either empty or have files with the extension "FILE" that are several KB in size.  Is this a corruption issue or is there a setting to prevent these folders from being generated, and is it safe to delete them?  All else seems to be working as expected.

Thanks

[Sebasty]

Hey @TommyTucker 

I recommend reinstalling Spotify. This issue sounds strange and a reinstall would help iron out any problems with your Spotify installation.

Also, go to Spotify Preferences (Ctrl + P) and check where Spotify puts its offline storage files. Maybe yours is somehow set to your Music folder.

If this didn't help, let me know what version of Spotify are you running, and if it's a Windows Store app or downloaded from spotify.com. 🙂

Let me know how you get on!

[TommyTucker]

Thanks for the reply. 

I am using my offline storage location, where I find these unwanted files, for both Spotify and songs that I have ripped or puchased and downloaded from online vendors.  I am running the latest Spotify version (1.1.45.621.gdddebadc), a quite new install, but these files were/are generated both by the previous version and the current version.  I got the Spotify app directly from them, not the Windows store.  I tried to attached one of the unwanted files as a typical sample but since it's a "File" type rather than any supported here, I get this message: "The file type (.file) is not supported. Valid file types are: jpg, gif, pdf, png, zip, mp4."  So I have zipped it.  The file itself can be opened with a text editor such as Wordpad.

Thanks again.

[Sebasty]

@TommyTucker 

Honestly I find there isn't much point in setting your Spotify's offline storage to be your music folder. It can freely sit in the default location as well (which is %appdata%/Local/Spotify/Storage, afaik), because those files can be read only by Spotify and it's not useful for any other media program or you also browsing your Music folder.

I don't see the zip archive (there's an issue with the board, don't worry), but I suppose this is what you're seeing:

..and then something called

0f34a330bdaffc79847872f00965381854c33358.file

in those folders.

Am I correct? 🙂

[TommyTucker]

Yes, that is exactly what I am seeing.  Do you recommend that I move all these as subfolders to a new folder and change my Spotify offline storage as that folder? 

Thanks.

[Sebasty · Accepted solution]

@TommyTucker 

Yeah, I do recommend changing Spotify's storage location.
Spotify's default storage location is there:

C:\Users\YourUsername\AppData\Local\Spotify\Storage

but you can use some other location too, if you'd like.

You don't have to mess with moving those folders out of your Music folder, you can just delete them. 🙂 Spotify recreates them as needed in the new location when you download playlists.

Let me know how it goes!