Spotify won't match my local files when listening on work computer

[sarahfelldown]

On my Mac at home, I imported my iTunes playlists into Spotify. Everything plays just fine on that computer (presumably) because the files are all there locally.

However when I use the web or desktop version of Spotify on my computer at work, NONE of my playlists have any playable songs. All of them have the little icon that means they were local files and cannot be played.

I thought the whole thing with Spotify was that you were supposed to be able to upload your playlists/tracks and anything that was in the Spotify catalog would be available for you to listen to anywhere/on any computer (with a free or paid subscription). This is how it worked for me for quite a while until about 6 months ago when I deleted all my iTunes playlists from Spotify and re-imported. (I'd made a lot of changes to my iTunes playlists, so I figured simply re-importing them all at once would be the quickest way to get them updated in Spotfiy.) After I re-imported, all of my tracks were marked as local files and I became unable to listen to any of my tracks on a computer other than my Mac at home.

I understand that some tracks may not be in Spotify's library but, for example, in the screenshots I've uploaded here (from the Spotify web player on my work computer) you can see that all of the tracks are grayed out. However if you search for most of them (in this case the Band of Skulls song) you can find them in the Spotify library. So why won't Spotify match these and allow me to play them?

I'm willing to do some trial and error to try to fix this if anyone has any ideas. I've tried all sorts of combinations of deleting all the playlists from Spotify, logging in and out, re-importing the iTunes playlists to Spotify then waiting hours (24 hours on yesterday's attempt) to check if they played on another computer or the web (thinking that maybe the Spotify servers needed time to process all the tracks).

If anyone has any suggestions, or if someone from Spotify could offer a solution, I'd really appreciate it.

I want to purchase a premium subscription, but if Spotify isn't going to do any matching then I don't see the point. I'd have to upload all the files to my other computers or devices which would defeat the purpose of using Spotify to stream and save space.

Thanks,

-Sarah

(edit: forgot the attachments)

[Novantique]

I'm having the same problem, all my music works fine at home, but if I go anywhere most of my songs don't work. Even though I got them after hearing them on Spotify in the first place 😠 Old forums say to 'unlink' the local files from the songs that won't play from the catalog, but this option seems to have been discarded in a recent update. I don't have that option anyway. Even unclicking the local file sources under prefrences didn't do anything. I've also heard that some people had success by changing the names of their local files, deleting them, or changing the file format. I've not tried any of this since I still want to be able to listen to my local stuff, but I can't find anything on how to 'unlink' local files with the updated spotify player.