Phantom devices on Spotify Android and web apps

[llima]

I have a problem with phantom devices appearing as available devices on Spotify. I have successfully followed steps to remove inactive devices, but this is a different problem because the phantom devices appear to be active.

Any suggestions?

When I enable the Spotify skill on my Alexa app, two unknown speaker groups appear on my Spotify app on my Android phone and on the web player. They are called "felTTrG5trackId-end104817276:0" and "yback pipeline is not playing" (without the quotes). If I select either of these, Spotify indicates it's playing on those speaker groups but I cannot hear music anywhere.

I have created and deleted speaker groups in the past using the Alexa app. In the Alexa app these groups do not exist. If I use the Alexa app or the Amazon Music app to play music, only the correct speaker groups and devices appear, including when playing Spotify content while the skill is linked.

I have tried and checked the following:

1. Unlink my Spotify account from Alexa, logout from Spotify everywhere, wait several hours, log back in, re-link. The phantom speaker groups reappear.

2. Tap or click on the 3 dots next to the speaker group and tap or click "logout". This does not remove the phantom speaker groups.

3. Clear cache, clear data, and uninstall the Spotify phone app. The phantom speaker groups reappear, which is not surprising because they also appear in the web player.

4. Clear cache, clear data, and uninstall the Alexa app. The phantom speaker groups do not appear in the Alexa app. Only the correct speaker groups and devices appear.

5. If I check the Spotify option to only show devices on the same network then all Alexa devices and speaker groups disappear, which is the expected behaviour.

6. I had an Everywhere speaker group that linked all my Echo devices. I have deleted it as part of testing, and it no longer appears on my Spotify app and web player.

7. These phantom speaker groups only appear when I re-link my Alexa with the Spotify skill, so I assume that it can only be my Alexa/Amazon account that is adding them back.

[Ivelina]

Hey there @llima,

Thanks for reaching out via the Community and kudos for already performing these steps! This really helps us with the investigation.

Since these phantom speaker groups show they're playing, but you don't hear any music then it's possible that there's a sync issue between Amazon's cloud and Spotify's server. With this said, here's some additional steps to go over in case any of them make a difference:

• Via voice command, ask an Echo device to play music on the phantom device "yback pipeline is not playing" (the other one's name would be more difficult to pronounce). If playback starts, the group could refresh and reappear in the Alexa app.
• As the group names are visible in Spotify, but not Alexa you can "overwrite" them by creating a new group in the Alexa app using the exact same names (this could merge the phantom group with the new one).
• Enable IPv6 in your router settings.
• Ensure all speakers and your phone are on the 2.4 GHz band.
• Update all firmware.

Lastly, you could once again go over the steps for skill reset:

• Disable the Spotify Skill in the Alexa app.
• From the Spotify Account Page, go to Manage apps and Remove Access for Alexa.
• Wait about an hour for the cloud data to clear.
• Re-enable the skill in the Alexa app and re-link your account.

Hope this info helps! Keep us posted and don't hesitate to let us know if you've got any questions in the meantime 🙂

[llima · Accepted solution]

Hi Ivelina,

Thanks for your reply.

I solved the problem, believe it or not, by doing something very basic that I hadn't tried yet: I restarted all my Echo devices. I did this one at a time to see which one might be the culprit, and found the one that was, somehow, for some reason, broadcasting its real name plus the two phantom ones. Once restarted, the phantom ones disappeared from the Spotify apps. I made sure to disable the Alexa skill and re-enable it between restarts.

If this hadn't worked one at a time, I would have still tried to bring them all offline at the same time, do some resets, logoffs and relinks before bringing them online again, but this wasn't necessary.

Thanks for the suggestions but in the end I didn't have to try any of those.

Luiz