Not all local files appearing on phone

[mana_]

Plan

Premium

Country

United Kingdom

Device

(iPhone 14, Acer Nitro 5)

Operating System

(iOS 16.1.1, Windows 10)

My Question or Issue

When I download songs from my pc on to my phone it appears as if everything has worked. However, when I click on the songs on mobile only 20 out of the 35 work, the rest are now greyed out and say song not downloaded.

[Lyubka]

Hey @mana_,

Thank you for reaching out here in the Community.

Could you try to log out > restart your phone > log back in to see if that makes any difference?

In case it doesn't, could you confirm that you've followed the steps in this article when you were trying to upload the tracks?  Do not forget that the synchronization between files from PC and your mobile devices over the network is no longer available. The audio files that you want to play within the app, need to be physically present on your iPhone's storage in order to be played by Spotify. 

In case you already uploaded them correctly and the tracks are still grayed out, it will be a good idea to remove all the local files you've uploaded on the app and try downloading them again. Moreover, it might be good to create new folders with the files.

Keep in mind that Spotify supports .mp3, .mp4, and .m4p files. It doesn’t support .mp4 files that contain video, or the iTunes lossless format (M4A). With that being said, some of your tracks may be protected in restricted formats and that might be the reason why they show as a grayed out. 

We'd recommend to head also to this FAQ under "Local File not playing?" to double check if those files meet the requirements listed there.
 

Hope this helps. Let us know how it goes.

[#3]

i purchased a recording of a concert that i went to, and i tried uploading the local files to spotify. everything went relatively smoothly on my laptop and most of the files appeared on my phone as well. however, there are three songs that i can't access on my phone and i have no idea why.

[Shack_Garza]

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@Lyubka wrote:

Do not forget that the synchronization between files from PC and your mobile devices over the network is no longer available. The audio files that you want to play within the app, need to be physically present on your iPhone's storage in order to be played by Spotify.

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why did they change this?

[vhain]

Because they are incompetent and don't care for users.

[Aidansond]

I found the problem, and Spotify take note please would be such an easy fix. Spotify only matches M4A files across devices if the millisecond value according to iTunes is under 500. It seems to think that any song with milliseconds over 500 are a full second longer and therefore the mobile app doesn't think it's the same song. If it's over that number, then it won't match on the mobile app. The two workarounds I've found are to: sync to iPhone by downloading a playlist with every desktop local song in it (album art doesn't work though), or convert the files to MP3 which sounds worse. Please, spotify, this would be such an easy fix and only seems to be a problem for the Files App and Apple Music Library sync methods (except for M4A album art that just doesn't work any way).