[BB] Spotify on Blackberry: Recurrent and frustrating problems with offline sync / playback

[clobqueen]

I am running spotify on a BlackBerry Torch 9800 (in the car), a Blackberry Torch 9860 (my regular device), and a windows system.  I am experiencing recurrent problems on the latest downloadable client and wanted to list them and see if anyone else agrees; maybe we can get spotify to address these.

1. Despite only having the allowed 3 devices with offline content, every time I turn one of my mobile devices from "offline" onto "online mode", the other one gets deleted because "offline access has been revoked for this device".  Then I have to completely resync that device, switch it back offline, and know that in a few weeks I will be doing it all over again.  It looks like the way spotify records the number of offline devices is borked for blackberry.

2.  Syncing is S-L-O-W.  Syncing a couple of thousand tracks over wifi (with 100M cable internet) will take almost 48 hours sometimes.  At a minimum, it takes a day to rebuild my playlists offline after they are deleted.

3. Spotify locks up every time I start it, within 30s of starting the app, for about 2 minutes.  It runs fine after, but the delay is really frustrating.  This happens on both 9800 and 9860.

4. Every so often, my devices will just refuse to sync point blank.  I get a message saying "syncing 1 of xxx", but progress never actually happens.  When this happens, I have to contact spotify support and they reset my playlists, which involves all offline content on all of my devices being deleted and needing resync.

It would be great to get some of these solved spotify; for example, being able to manage what devices are registered to hold offline content ourselves would help.

Other than that, I love your product, I use it every day on desktop, and I couldn't live without it.  I just wish your mobile offering was up to the same standard.

[Peter__]

Hey! 🙂

I am a long time BlackBerry and Spotify user, so I guess I'll give my opinions! 😛 

Point 1 - This doesn't just occur on BlackBerry devices. I have seen posts all over the forums about other platforms too that see this issue. There should be a way to manage offline devices in my opinion.

Point 2 - Syncing playlists from scratch seems to take an age, no matter what speed of connection you have. Although I don't have any massive playlists so its not really an issue to me. 

Point 3 - This appears to be caused by playlists "resyncing" on my device when you start it up. It appears to sync a number of tracks from offline playlists even when they have already been downlaoded before. 

Point 4 - Again, I have never had to do this but I have heard reports from several others saying that playlists refuse to sync. 

Other points I have noticed:

5. Some songs won't play the whole way through, they get to a point and appear to freeze causing the player to jump to the next track. 

6. If the application freezes for any reason, there is no way to kill it without restarting the phone. 

7. New playlists created on the desktop client don't always seem to sync to mobile devices. Like currently I am subscribed to a playlist called "Chill" by one of my housemates but it doesn't sync to my BlackBerry.

Any BlackBerry fans out there want to post their experiences too :)?

Also click the link in my signature for Spotify on BlackBerry 10 next year!

Peter

[clobqueen]

You may find that you can do BB10 support through the android runtime, when the time comes?

[Peter__]

I did suggest that in my post in the Ideas Board too! 🙂 

Although I would imagine a native application would be so much better and smoother! 

Peter

[dvopa44]

Yep, I can just confir your points 5 & 6. What I find also frustrating is that some songs sound like damaged and are being interrupted like if you bounce a CD player. 

The app is also not very sexy compared to Spotify for Android...