[Desktop] "Unavailable" song won't play from local to anywhere else but the PC it is stored on

[CroiCroga]

Plan

Premium

Country

Russia

Device

An assortment of devices - PC, Macbook, a few iPhones, an iPad, Bose SoundTouch speakers.

Operating System

Windows 10, iOS 14.4 & 15, MacOSx 10.14

My Question or Issue

I migrated from Apple Music a while ago, and had been trying to deal with this issue with the unavailable songs since August.

Let's say I have a local copy of an album, and a song in it is unavailable on Spotify, but I have it stored locally - I have 70+ GBs of music accumulated from CDs so there's a lot of those.

But for the sake of simplicity let's assume I am talking about a single audio file now.

I can listen to it on the device where it is stored - on PC.

But it just won't play anywhere else, on any other devices. I can't even stream it to a speaker on wi-fi - when I try to stream it anywhere, other devices are just grayed out. Sometimes, if I keep trying to stream it somewhere, I get an error saying that if I have a copy of this song, I should add it to my library - but IT IS in my library!

I created so many playlists, and they do sync to other devices like an iPhone or a Macbook, but the unavailable song would still be grayed out and won't start playing.

If I connect iPhone to PC, I can even control the PC's Spotify app and iPhone would show that "unavailable" song, start playback and allow to control for sound volume - but all of this on PC only, so this is not a connectivity issue, obviously. They all see each other pretty well.

I even saw that PC client "the song is unavailable" error and the song becoming grayed out for a few minutes in Spotify WHILE it was actually playing at the same time on the same device. 

This annoys me to no end, I pay Spotify for the premium, I paid the artists for their albums, I have the files, why in Christ's sake can't I play them on my local wifi network? Whom else do I have to pay?

Apple Music didn't have any problems like this, but I liked that Spotify app is available on almost every device that I own and I wanted to support Stotify's decision to offer its services in my country. Do I have to go back to Apple now?

[Alex]

Hi @CroiCroga,

Thanks for the post.

Local files will only work on your computer or phone/ tablet. They won't work with other devices. 

Spotify stores and plays content from cache files. You can add your local files to a playlist, however to play those on your phone you'll need to download the playlist.

For more info on troubleshooting issues with local files head over to this thread and check out Katerina's post.

Hope this helps. Don't hesitate to reach out again if you have questions.

[CroiCroga]

Hello, Alex!

I wrote about playlists,

>they do sync to other devices like an iPhone or a Macbook, but the unavailable song would still be grayed out and won't start playing.

I probably should have been more clear on “they do sync part” - the playlists in question are downloaded to a device and are available offline, but the “unavailable” song in such a playlist would still not play. It would remain grayed out. 

[Ver]

Hey @CroiCroga,

Thanks for getting back to us 🙂

In this case it's a good idea to give these steps a go and run a clean reinstall. That way you can make sure that the app is up-to-date and the cache is not causing any issues. Keep in mind that you'll need to download the content again in order to listen to it in offline mode.

If the option to Show Unplayable Songs is turned off, we'd suggest you turn it on to see if that changes anything.

Just to double-check-one song is appearing to be grayed out or multiple songs?

Keep us posted.