Local files with special characters in title are unplayable (iPhone)

[glub]

Plan

Premium

Country

USA

Device

iPhone XR

Operating System

iOS 15.5

Most of the local files on my phone, when downloaded from my laptop, appear grayed out and are unplayable upon closing the app and reopening it. This appears to be a common problem here within the community, however, none of the solutions on this website have worked, including performing a clean reinstall of the app.

After inspecting the "Local Files" playlist, I found that there were duplicate files created for every item I downloaded that contained spaces or special characters in the title, and each duplicate file had subsequently removed these spaces and/or special characters (ex. an item originally titled "A! (B) C?" would create a duplicate file simply named "ABC"). Every item that received a duplicate of itself would render itself unplayable, however, I've found that items that did not contain any spaces or special characters did not create duplicate files and played just fine. I hypothesize that finding a way to stop these duplicate files from creating themselves would solve the issue, but I don't know how. This issue hasn't come up for the two years I've used local files on my phone, and I would prefer it if it didn't have to come to tediously renaming, redownloading and reorganizing every playlist to not have any files with spaces or special characters in the title. 

This problem only started occurring after I reinstalled the Spotify app today to try and resolve a different issue. Perhaps it was some new update I installed that caused this issue, but I'm not too sure. I even saw that someone in the community was having the same exact issue on their desktop a few years ago, but I couldn't find a solution for the mobile app. My laptop plays all local files just fine. Please inform me if you have any solutions, I would greatly appreciate it. 

[Susan_GP · Accepted solution]

Hi @glub,

Thanks for posting in the Community and welcome. We apologize for the delay in our response.

We checked from our side and couldn't replicate the behavior. However, you seem to be still syncing the Local Files from your computer. Although this still works, we have a new and improved Local Files experience that we recommend you start using. With this new experience, you must have the Local Files stored on the device you want to listen to them from. This means, that if you wish to access the Local Files from your mobile device and not have any issues, the audio files must be stored on your mobile device.

That being said, we'd recommend starting off by clearing the cache by going to your iPhone > Spotify > Settings > Storage. Then, go to Settings and tap Local Files. There, make sure the Show audio files from this device feature is enabled. 

Now you'll need to transfer the audio files to the Spotify folder on your mobile device, as they'll need to be stored there in order to work correctly. This folder can be found on the iOS Files app, under ‘On My iPhone/iPad > Spotify. Follow the steps below:

• Mac: Open Finder > Select the iOS device from the sidebar > Click Music or File in the button bar > Drag the file/s from the window into the Spotify folder

On the Spotify app for iOS, go to Your Library > Local Files, you should now see all available tracks in this folder. You can refresh your local files by toggling Show Local Files on and off in case you're not seeing tracks there.

Lastly, as you still have synced Local Files from your computer, this might result in seeing the same songs twice and you will need to organize the songs one last time. However, you shouldn't see any more unplayable duplicates with this new experience.

Let us know how that goes or if you have any questions.

[glub]

Hello, it looks like transferring audio from my laptop to my iPhone and then pulling the local files from within my device solved the issue! All items, regardless of the title, are now playable! I didn't have a Mac (I use Windows), but I used this article and followed the "For Windows, using iTunes:" tutorial 🙂 Thank you for your help!

[Susan_GP]

Hi there @glub,

Thanks for your reply.

We're glad to know everything seems to be in order now! Thanks for sharing the article that helped you resolve it. 

If you have any questions or need anything else, the Community is here for you.