Local file does not always 'match' with spotify album

[bar1990]

I am having an issue 'matching' my local files to spotify's album.

I recently purchased the newest Dr. Dre Album (Compton) from itunes.  Compton is not available on spotify, but the album is 'greyed out' in the spotify database (you can navigate to the album, but if you try to play any song from the album, Spotify throws error "This track is not available. If you have the file on your computer you can import it"). 

I have successfully imported the local files into my spotify library, and can play them from a playlist in spotify (see image below).  However, when I go to the album in spotify, only two of the tracks are 'linked' - meaning that if I navigate to the album in the spotify library, and play track 1, track 1 will play. However, if I click on track 5, it will not play.

Spotify is not able to associate the file I added (track 5 on Compton by Dr. Dre) with the album in it's database, but is able to associate track 1. How can tell spotify that these files should be associated with this song in it's database?  If have attached an image - hopefully this helps explain my issue.

[sebastiankreuz]

Hi @bar1990!

Thanks for bringing this up and welcome to the Community.

It's currently not possible to link/unlink your local tracks from the songs listed on our catalog, but one of our Community members has posted this idea. You can show your support by giving some Kudos!

We'd also love to have all of Dr. Dre's stuff available, but sometimes agreements can't be reached with an artist or label. More info on this here.

[adriankt]

Simple workaround:

1. Disconnect from the internet
2. Go to Local Songs and add the album to your desired playlist
3. Connect back to the internet

Note: the album art may be replaced by Spotify but it seems that this will prevent them from changing the MP3 and will keep it local.

🙂 

[emanon024]

This work around totally worked for playing on my laptop!  I was able to sync it to my phone as well, but with all the wrong album art (maching from other tracks)   This is particually useful for live concerts of bands that already have live albums on Spotify, like Phish, Grateful Dead, Umphrey's McGee, Ween, etc.

As long as your input system is offline while you import and create the playlist it will be the local file that wins.

[canned_koala]

Regarding this Dr. Dre's album the reason of "greying out" and not associating local files with the database is in tagging methods differences. As you can see on screenshot:

All featured artists on iTunes are listed in a track's name field, but on Spotify this field contains only track's name, featured guys are listed as additional artists. So all you need to do is to remove this info about featured articts in brackets from tag of your purches tracks on iTunes. The result is this: 

All tracks have been imported from iTunes, they are can be added to playlists and to the library.

[nonsensicalspud]

you used to be able to unlink them from the online catalogue, but spotify removed that feature for some stupid reason

[hansenkd]

This has become worse in the last couple of weeks.  Recently, I was somehow logged out of Spotify on my desktop.  When I got logged back on, some of my local files (mostly iTunes imports of songs not available on Spotify) that had been linked to the greyed-out database files for a very long time with no problem (sometimes for a couple of years) were suddenly grey in my playlists where I used the album info from the database.  It seems that something has actually "happened" with this very recently.

In order to fix the issue, I had to go into my file system on my physical device and do some edits to titles, artists, albums, etc., often really mundane things like replacing a lowercase letter with a capital one on words like "for" and "and" to match what the Spotify database had.  Eventually, you can manipulate it to work, but this is annoying and tedious.  It did not used to be this way, and this little "bug" with matching local files to the database is very, very recent indeed--and extremely annoying.  Matching used to work miraculously well not that long ago, and now it's completely messed up and too finicky with exact metadata matching.  Would really love it if this could go back to the way it was before so that I do not have to manipulate things locally and the matching were more intuitive and would happen more quickly.  I know it's possible because that's the way it's happened before.