Please Help Me Understand Syncing Better

[christophernyck]

Can someone help me out here?  

I imported all of my iTunes playlists into Spotify on my iMac. Many of those playlists have songs that are not avaiable in Spotify, but are available in my iTunes library as local files.  When I use Spotify Mobile, the only songs I want copied onto to my iPhone are the local files necessary to fill in the gaps on these Spotify playlists, and have all other songs stream.  

Syncing should allow this, as I understand it.  However, when I select the playlists to sync, it appears Spotify wants to copy all of the local files to my iPhone, even though many of those songs are available to stream.  This ends up taking up a ton of unnecessary space on my iPhone.  Am I doing something wrong?  Or am I completely wrong that this is even happening like this?

Any info is appreciated.

Chris

[Nyx]

Local file or "in the cloud," as the term is, is still a file with a size based on quality and song length (in the case of music files).

When you tell Spotify to sync (which, in my opionion, is an inaccurate term), you're telling it you want to be able to listen to the songs on that particular playlist even if there is no wifi or cellular data plan available to stream it. So, what Spotify does is download those files to your device, taking up the space necessary to save those songs to that drive. It doesn't matter if the file is local or on Spotify's servers.

So, in theory, what you'd need to do is manually create each playlist so it points to the songs that are available on Spotify and point to the local files as you need to 'fill in the gaps." But, in the end, once you tell it to make it available offline, or "sync" it, it won't matter because it will download the full files to your device for those times where wifi/cell service isn't available.

I realize this is a little convoluted, but did it make sense or help any?

[christophernyck]

I think I achieved what I was trying for.  The first thing I did was delete all the playlists and music on my iPhone, essentially freeing up most of the storage.  I then selected all of my playlists in Spotify on my desktop iMac where all my music is stored and selected "sync."  Now I have all the songs in all of my playlists available in Spotify -- even the ones not available on Spotify.  There's no longer any duplication between Spotfy and the iTunes/Music app on my iPhone.  And everything is available offline.  AND I can fit a ton more music on my iPhone now. This whole setup is genius. I'm a very happy camper.

Thank you for your reply as this was making me crazy until I tried this approach!

ck