Spotify as a premium user - my experiences and ideas / troubles / wishes

[Viennatom]

Plan

Premium

Country

Austria

Device

Umidigi F1, HP Z620 Windows Workstation, Lightweight Linux Laptop, i7-8700K-Desktop with Windows

Operating System

WIN 7, WIN 10, Linux Mint, Android

My Issues as I am fighting hard to get evrything working:

1. I 'd really like a button on the currently playing song to fast remove it from all playlists with one click - no searching through 800 files playlists.

2. Umidigi F1 song menu crash issue - this one is already known to Spotify, hope there ll be a fix soon. This is horrible.

3. I have several devices and I like downloading to save mobile internet quota. But I'd really like the downloaded files to be transferable between my devices. I would save internet bandwidth by not having to download every file several times AND - since the files are encrypted anyway - there would be no drawback to Spotify or the music industry, as long as the files are encrypted. Spotify, why not just modify the encryption so that the files are linked to a user / an account instead of to a device. 

4. Local files: Some of my very important songs are unfortunetaly not on Spotify. Is it possible to play local files on different devices, and have Spotify recognize them? E. g. the files would be same on the Android, the Linux and the Windows device, but the folder path may look different. How can I have my playlists "recognize" the files as being the same? (I have no cloud storage). 

5. Why is spotify sometimes "forgetting" about the downloaded playlists after a few days / weeks? Can you try to get the app fully working instead of only 95%?

6. Question: What is the sampe rate of Spotify files when set to highest quality? Is it 44.1 or 48kHz? I need this to work on optimizing the signal chain from Spotify to device to audio interface to DSP controller and from there to the amp channels. I want to avoid any superfluous sample rate conversion / signal modification / resampling etc...

[Guido]

Hello @Viennatom,

Thanks for getting in touch. We'll try to address your questions as good as possible.

1. Check out this idea. It's about a shortcut that can remove a song from a playlist without leaving the Now Playing View. You can vote for it, regardless what it's current status is.

2. Indeed we're aware about an issue with Umidig devices. Be sure to hit vote and leave a comment on this Ongoing Issue so you can be kept up-to-date.

3. We had a Live Idea about the ability to transfer 'Downloads' between devices without using Mobile Data. The idea expired due to no getting enough votes but feel free to create a new idea and we'll link the two ideas together. Here's the link to the existing idea.

4. It's possible to sync your Offline files across devices. Specifically from your desktop computer to a mobile device. You can find more info about this here. Keep in mind that Linux isn't an official release so you might not be able to sync your Local Files to or from your Linux device. In that case a shared drive or cloud could be more useful for you.

5. Downloads shouldn't be forgotten. Perhaps you can follow the next few steps to have the cache for you Offline music reset:

1. Reinstall Spotify
2. Before you install Spotify back onto your device, remove all Offline devices from here
3. Reboot your device and Install Spotify again
4. Redownload all your music (it's best not to have your screen turn off while downloading and to keep Spotify focussed)

If you are using an SD card, try not removing it from your device as it could corrupt your Downloads. You can also test a different SD card as something might be up with the one you are using now.

6. Spotify for Artists have an FAQ that goes a bit deeper into the audio settings we use. Take a look at this page.

Hope this answers some questions you are looking for. Let us know if there is anything else!

Have a nice day.

[Viennatom]

Hello, I did not press "Accept as a Solution", since not ervrything is solved (and I am not sure if I could comment as I do now on if I did).
Anyway, I really really appreciate your feedback!

1. Voted.

2. Absolute worst nightmare of my sleepless nights. Torture like in medieval ages. It is not that I cannot afford to just ditch the Umidigi and buy a better phone. The issue is - regardless what I plan to do, go back to older Umidigi system or buy different phone - it looks I cannot avoid having to install and configure the whole phone with ALL the APPS / Settings etc. again!! What a pain! (Unless Spotify or Umidigi can solve it).

3. There seem to be only few guys interested in this.
For sure I ll get over this within a few months once my different playing devices are fully "loaded" with offline content, mobile quotas should then be no more be of a painful concern.... But until then ... it is such a pain watching the monthly data counter go down and down.

4. Working to get it running..

5. Was maybe my fault. Since the PCs are dual-boot, I had installed both Linux and Windows Spotify on each of them. Add the mobile phone and the Laptop and I have actually 6 players in parallel, causing troubles with the downloaded data.
6. I see you are working fully on 44.1kHz. I have always wondered how can the world be split into 2 different sampling rates (48k and now even 96k for the recording industry, 44.1 for the music / CD industry) WITH THE CONVERSION BETWEEN THE 2 FORMATS ALWAYS being "the" weak point in audio chains. Conversion is only good with Sinc resampling which a. takes processing power, b. must be programmed properly.
Anyway, I wonder you actually store different versions of the songs instead of just doing "on-the-fly-transcoding" if any quality less than the highest is asked by customers. I ve heard, Netflix does live transcoding even though videos are way more computationally-intensive than just audio tracks.

Greetings,

Tom

[Viennatom]

about 2.: Could not hear anything from Spotify over weeks  (!) on this MOST IMPORTANT SPOTIFY ISSUE EVER! No fix, no info about root cause found, no info about any root cause analysis progress - nothing. That is VERY frustrating.