Syncing m4a ALAC files - Why?

[notebene]

Several years back, I decided to re-rip my entire music library as m4a ALAC. Many, or most, of my playlists contain local files, as Spotify doesn't have everything available, often because it's either the artists' best work, or on labels that Spotify doesn't have deals with. Even when it is available, there's no guarantee it doesn't disappear one day. The wonderful world of renting assets. A strong argument for the world of Plex. I digress.

At any rate, my playlists used to sync fine to Spotify on my iPhone, 'after' I had converted everything to m4a (alac). Recently, it has stopped. I searched the forums and saw some posts dated a few years back from Jeremy (as an example, no intention of singling that poster out) where there is a caveat for syncing m4a in alac, as in, it won't.

Not sure why I was syncing up until just a few weeks ago, but at some point, it 'did' work.

The question now is, other than a blanket statement that it (maybe?) doesn't: why? To me, a file is a file is a file. If I turn file sharing on my computer, and go to another computer, I can open files on the other computer. It doesn't tell me "well, you can't sync Excel files though". TXT files are okay, but not if you edited the file in Notepad++.

So...why? I mean, I did. But now that I can't, 'why' can't I? The files 'play' just fine in Spotify on my computer, so why not let them sync to my phone...on my own network?

[OscarDC]

Hey @notebene,

Thank you for reaching out to the Community and welcome.

We appreciate your feedback regarding this function. However, the process to discover local files has changed recently and the steps you've mentioned could not work anymore. Now it's necessary to have the audio file stored on the device to be able to listen to it as a local file, but the syncing is not working between devices for some of our users.

We're always testing things by adding or removing features to make Spotify better overall. We're sorry that this means you're not able to use Spotify like you wish to do at the moment, but we hope you'll continue using it and find it gets better in the future.

In the meantime, we'd suggest showing your support for similar ideas like this one and this one by hutting the "thumbs up" button. Also, we'd recommend checking their status out for more info. Any relevant updates will be posted there.

In case anything else comes up, the Community is just a post away.

[notebene · Accepted solution]

Wasn't quite what I was looking for in my case, but appreciate the answers. I wasn't looking to sync between multiple computers across a cloud, just local files to my phone. Though, that is an intriguing idea.

It turns out I didn't understand the new(ish?) or changed 'local' setting, and it was possibly turned off during an update? It read like it wanted to include local files from my phone into Spotify, and that didn't seem like what I wanted, but reading through more posts it seems like that is 'exactly' what I needed to have on. Local files are now syncing again, including m4a files that are ALAC.