Imported iTunes playlist - songs not playable on web browser

[ben_wren]

Hi,

I imported my iTunes playlists, wanting to use one in particular.  On the desktop version of Spotify, I can play all the tracks in the playlist, and in the metadata of each track it shows an album on Spotify that the track comes from, rather than the album it's tagged with on my local files.

I made the playlist public, and when I click on the link to it and view it in a web browser, all the tracks imported from iTunes are greyed-out, I can't play them, and the albums tagged in the metadata are the original albums they were tagged with on my local files, rather than the ones shown on the same playlist when I view on the desktop.

I'd assumed when I imported the playlists that Spotify had matched the tracks with versions available on Spotify.  The fact that there were a few that it couldn't find, which didn't appear on the imported list (and also one that had incorrectly matched to a live version of the same song), seemed to confirm this.  But looking at it on the web version, it doesn't let me play these songs, and looks as if it's linking to the local files instead of versions on Spotify.  It does, of course, let me play songs that were added to the playlist within Spotify, after it was imported from iTunes.

Does anyone know why it does this?  Why are the album tags different depending on where I view the playlist?  And is there a way to make all the songs playable on the playlist so I could share it with people?

Thanks very much!

Ben

[FabianS_Bogota]

Hey @ben_wren, welcome to the Spotify Community!

Sorry to hear you're experiencing this. The local files that you add to Spotify are only playable on the device that the files are. Keep in mind that the Web Player will work only with Spotify's tracks and not local files.

You could download them on your phone and here's some info about it.

Regarding the name of the tracks, Spotify looks for matches of the local files within the Spotify catalog, when there's a match the name will look slightly different. 

Hope this clear things up.

Take care!

[ben_wren]

Hi @Fabian_SB,

Thanks very much for the reply! 

I'm afraid your answer doesn't really clear things up...  Obviously I understand that the web version wouldn't play local files, that's obvious.  But the point is that on the desktop version, the files don't appear to be local files.  Firstly: After I imported the iTunes playlist, at least two of the items was playing a totally different piece of audio from that on my computer - Spotify had matched one of them to a live version of the song, instead of the original studio recording on my computer.  Another one had matched to a slightly different studio recording than the one in my iTunes.  It was obvious to hear that both of these were different from the local files on my computer.  Secondly: There were a number of items on the original iTunes playlist that were not available on the Spotify list.  Most of these did not seem to be available on Spotify, though I did find a couple of them by searching, that had not been found automatically when importing.  Thirdly: The metadata on all of the tracks on the list matched metadata from the Spotify catalogue, and not the metadata on my local files.  As you say, when Spotify finds a match, this will happen.  But this, along with the other two pieces of evidence, suggest Spotify is finding matches for the songs on my iTunes playlist, and then creating a playlist made up of matched items from the Spotify catalogue. 

Further to this, the web version displays different metadata to the desktop version - E.g. many of my local files in question were tagged as being in a various artists album I had named "random tracks".  On the web player, this was the album that shows up in the metadata, suggesting it refers to local files.  On the desktop software, however, the tracks were tagged with individual album titles which matched tracks found in the catalogue.  If the desktop software is playing local files, why would it A) fail to import all of the songs; B) match some of them incorrectly; C) use different metadata for the songs, but not on the web player; and D) why wouldn't the software make it clear it was pointing to local files rather than catalogue audio?

What this all means is that it's next to impossible to share a playlist with another Spotify user if the playlist originated in iTunes.  What's the point in it matching all the data if you can't then use that data to share the playlist?

Can you explain any of the above discrepancies?

Thanks again,

Ben