download to iphone

[DM35]

Is it possible to download songs free of charge to iphone and save the tracks for repeated use on the phone's memory ?  Various sites say this can only be done with spotify's premium service. Spotify says songs can be saved temporarily free of charge. I would apprecaite clarification, please.

[Bethany_Dawn]

Hi DM35 and welcome to the community! 🙂
Spotify Premium does allow users to download and store songs for access at any time - whether or not they have a data connection.
Offline downloading is one of the perks of Premium so I know of no way to do this on the free service - even if just temporary. I'm curious to know where you are seeing it can be done this way. 🙂
And just in case - if you haven't already, you can try out the Premium features for free by signing up for a trial.
Have a great day!

[DM35]

Hi Bethany_03,
The information is on the spotify website -  Systems and Settings / Storage Information.
David

[Bethany_Dawn]

Hi again and thanks for the info! 🙂

I found the area you are referencing and hopefully can clarify the description.

Spotify uses your device’s available memory storage for 2 purposes:

• To store temporary, or snippets of, music for streaming (i.e. as cache). This means that when you press play, you hear the music immediately with few interruptions.
• To store downloaded music if you listen offline (Premium only).

This temporary storage in the cache functions much like a website browser does when storing cookies and other temp setting files. This enables Spotify to retrieve your information/song library faster when you are online so it's not always trying to buffer a song each time you play something.
The only time I see this brief buffering happen is when it's a new song I'm trying to load.
However, this is not true offline play. A good example of this is I sometimes use my cellphone to hotspot to my desktop. And even though I listen repetitively to some songs daily on both ios and my mac (and they are stored to my cache in both), they will not load anymore on the mac once the phone's hotspot connection is terminated.
To truly store music to your device and access offline you would need the Premium plan.

Hope this helped and have a good one! 🙂

[DM35]

Hi Bethany,
Thanks for your reply
>From what you are saying, using the free service, I would have to download each time I wanted to listen to a song , using my data allowance on each occasion. The only alternative would be the premium subscription service which would allow permanent storage of a song on the Iphone's memory without the need to download each time I listen to the same song.
Have I got this right ?
Sorry for my technophobia.
David.

[Bethany_Dawn]

Hi again, David!

No problem, hopefully I can explain a little bit more. 🙂
In order to use the free service you will need a constant data connection - whether over wifi, wired internet, or a mobile service. Spotify will stream constantly while connected and uses that cache storage to access songs quickly. However, it will not actually be storing them to your phone for offline listening. Once you lose connection, you lose access to the songs.

If you upgrade to Premium, you then have the choice to download songs directly to your device's internal storage and listen whenever you want - data connection active or not. This is a really great function for when you are highly mobile or in areas that don't have a great signal and might cut off your free streaming.

It's alot like buying a song, but instead of buying just one song or an album and downloading it, you have unlimited access to all of Spotify's library for one Premium price - with the ability to download and change whatever you are listening to whenever you want. 🙂

Please let me know if you have any other questions and I'd be happy to try and help some more.

Have a great one!

[DM35]

Hi,
Thanks for your reply.  How many megabytes is the average 3 minute song ?  My data package  will permit 300 MB per month.
David.

[Bethany_Dawn]

Hey again! 🙂
The MB usage is broken out by the streaming quality rate you listen to.
Spotify has 3 settings for listening quality: Normal, High, and Extreme (Extreme is Premium only).

I found a helpful article online here that breaks down how Spotify is used on mobile, but have highlighted the most relevant info below for you. 🙂
If you are a fairly casual listener and want to be on the free service with a lower quality stream you should have plenty of data allowance. Plus, if you ever connect to wifi, that will not count against your mobile usage to listen.
If you decided to go with Premium and download playlists directly to your device you would not use any of your mobile data once you take the app offline.
Hopefully this is all useful for you!

How Many Megabytes Per Minute Does Spotify Use?

On a general scale, the approximate data used with one song on Spotify depending on the quality you have selected are as follows:

• Normal: 96 kbps usages about 0.72 MB of data per minute (this makes the average MB use per song about 2.88 MB).
• High: 160 kbps uses about 1.20 MB of data per minute (around 4.8 MB per song).
• Extreme: 320 kbps uses up to 2.40 MB of data per minute (averaging out 9.60 MB per song).

Now you know how much a song spends on Spotify depending on the quality, you can calculate your approximate monthly data usage. To do so we'll need to know how many songs you listen to each month and, taking into account the previous calculation, count how many megabytes you spend per song. Multiplying both figures you'll get to know how many MBs you use on Spotify.

For example, if you listen to 50 songs each month at high quality, i.e 160 kbps, the formula we'll have to apply to calculate the data we'll use is as follows:

• 50 songs X 4.8 MB = 240 MB per month

Of course this is for average songs. If you are into house music, it's likely the total amount will be much higher as these tracks tend to be longer. If you want to calculate how many megabytes you use by the hour:

• 60 minutes X 1.2 MB per minute = 72 MB per hour of streaming music