[Android] Local Files unusable in its current state

[Notgnihtrow]

Plan

Premium

Country

Canada

Device

Samsung Galaxy 

My Question or Issue

So I was going to buy a few new albums like I usually do, decided to try Premium as I've always thought the free experience was awful mostly with it never playing the song or album you ask for (for shadowing)

So I have premium, I enabled Local files the app adds all the 6.5k songs on my phone to a single playlist ok great i can still just use voice commands to ask for whatever I want right? Asked it to play an artist (Sody), who turns out isn't on Spotify but the app didn't even try to find the albums on my phone. All 6.5k songs are in one giant unsearchable, unusable playlist. 

OK fine, ask Spotify to play another artist (Lights), again ignored the 18 albums on my phone, and serves me a playlist almost exclusively songs they didn't write. It was all songs they had a feature in, and none of their solo work.

Ideally Spotify should check my library first, so I don't have to waste data streaming a song that is stored on my device, and also allows me to play artists that aren't on Spotify. Rather than ignore my library and pretend like those songs don't exist.

If Spotify cant search and serve me music from my library I see no point continuing to use it. Sure I have access to a ton of artists and albums I've never heard of...but I lose all convenient access to the albums and artists I like and listen to regularly.

[OscarDC · Accepted solution]

Hey @Notgnihtrow,

Thank you for reaching out to the Community and welcome. 

We appreciate your feedback about this. However, most of our features may only work with the content available in our catalog. This means that features such as Search or Smart Shuffle need to use the metadata added to the track when it is uploaded to our platform to work properly. 

Since local files are audio files added from your device to your account, but not uploaded to the app, the Search function will skip them as they don't have the necessary information to be included.

However, you can still look for a track within a playlist using the Sort/Filter function. To do so, just check out the steps mentioned in this article.

Hope this helps. If anything else comes up, the Community will be here for you. 

[Notgnihtrow]

I dont "like" this answer but it sounds like the best one im gonna get.  Its wild to me free music apps can properly parse the metadata on my library (or any CD frankly) but Spotify cant. Unless its like how iTunes/Apple would convert everything to .aac files just to make things hard and lock users into their ecosystem. Not sure if they still do that shady stuff but that's why I stopped buying iPods/Apple products, and it looks like its why I wont be renewing my subscription here.