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Latest release stuck offline problem and solution (sort of)

Hi, I would just like to pass on my experiences (good and bad) with using the latest Spotify for Android release on a long car journey over the past few days. I have just driven from Sweden to England, to visit family, and used Spotify in the car for all my listening pleasure, setting Spotify to offline mode as soon as I was no longer on Swedish soil and could not stream without incurring expensive roaming charges.

 

First the good news...

Spotify worked excellently in the car and didn't crash, stutter or stall even once.

 

Now the bad news...

After arriving in England and with access to my brother's internet conneciton via WiFi I tried to set Spotify online again in order to sync some more tunes, but Spotify would not go online. I tried roaming on 3G to see if this would make a difference, but it didn't. I tried logging out and logging in again both while connected via WiFi and 3G. Still no joy. All the time this was happening I never lost access to the offline synced tracks, they still played, and I didn't have any problem logging out and in again, it's just that Spotify wouldn't go online.

I was not prepared to do a re-install and lose 3GB worth of offline tracks as my brother has a usage cap on his internet connection and re-syncing everything would have put him over the edge. So I experimented by moving some of the cache files (I remembered a previous problem in the Linux preview release that required deleting a file in the cache called "offline" in order to stop the Linux client crashing on start-up). I tried moving (not deleting) the following files to a temporary location...

"offline"
"offline.bnk"
"offline.bmk.tmp"

 

These files are located on Android in the directory...

"/Android/data/com.spotify.mobile.android.ui/cache"

Removing all 3 files and restarting Spotify resulted in having to log in again, but it did not solve the offline problem. The 3 files were also not recreated after successfully logging in again. Otherwise everything else still worked ie. playing offline synced tracks.

 

After some further experimentation I found that the follwoing sequence of steps got Spotify working and online again...

  1. Kill the Spotify process if it's running.
  2. Move only the "offline" file back to the cache directory (not "offline.bnk" or "offline.bnk.tmp")
  3. Make sure you have a working WiFi or 3G connection.
  4. Start Spotify.
  5. Spotify magically goes online again (if it doesn't try toggling offline mode in the settings)
  6. Move the files "offline.bnk" and "offline.bnk.tmp" back to the cache directory while Spotify is still running.
  7. Situation normal again with everything working and online. You can now kill Spotify, start it again, set it to offline mode and then turn that off again and everything works as it should again.

 

Here's hoping this post can help some other users if they find themselves stuck in offline mode (obviously this comes with a warning that messing about with the cache files might make you lose all your offline content and need to reinstall Spotify again. The solution above worked for me, but your mileage may vary).

 

It would also be very nice to get some feedback from the Spotify's Android developers on what they think the problem is and if it's reproducable, and some explanation of what those files ("offline", "offline.bnk" and "offline.bnk.tmp") in the cache do would also be welcome. Spotify developer Bengan is doing a sterling job over in the iOS forum and it would be nice if we could get the same level of service over here in the Android forum.

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