The iPad that stole Christmas

[brianhancill]

Sorry, this is a super-long question, but it's a complicated issue.

So... I have Spotify version 0.6.0.181 on my ancient iPad 1. I only use this for playing music over Bluetooth when I'm away and to read e-books. I have Spotify 1.0.44.100 on my 2009 MacBook Pro, and version 6.5.0 on my iPhone 4 . You may surmise that I'm not one of those Apple geeks who has to keep all their hardware updated. You're right.

A couple of weeks ago I wanted to convert my 1,000-plus iTunes playlist of Christmas music into a Spotify playlist so I could stream the music on the iPad while not at home). The only way I could do this (that I know of) was to add ALL of my several hundred iTunes playlists to Spotify in the MacBook app, which took forever, and worked a bit haphazardly (precisely two were put inside a folder called iTunes and the rest were appended to the bottom of my Playlists).

Spotify found around 700 of my Christmas songs in its own library, which is pretty good when you consider that the pre-iTunes source for quite a lot of this music was a series of home-compiled compilation CDs.

So all is well except for one little snag. None of the iTunes playlists have shown up in the iPad version of Spotify, even 10 days later. I noticed that they had been imported as private playlists on the MacBook so I changed the Christmas one to public and restarted the iPad, but no dice. So I searched for the playlist name (Christmas MP3s, if anyone's interested) but although I can find it under my name when I search on the computer, it does not find it on the iPad.

I realise that I am probably up against an unavoidable limitation of the old iPad version here, but does anyone know how I can get this one playlist on there by any means other than laborious manual recompiling? I wonder whether there's anything I can do with the Spotify URL from the computer, but I can't see a way to use that on the iPad version.

By the way, the iTunes lists do show up in Spotify on the iPhone, but the interface is small and fiddly and unresponsive when it's playing music... press a link, wait several seconds before anything happens.