Spotify Connect/Cast is Broken, Can't Switch Devices Without Losing Queue

[jdtemple]

Plan

Premium

Country

United States

Device

Pixel Fold

Operating System

Windows 11 Pro

My Question or Issue

Spotify Connect and Cast is broken on Android.

The issues I have seen in the past is what led me to switch to YouTube Music for a period of time, but that's bad in its own special way. My family voted me out so I had to switch us all back to Spotify.

1. If I am casting to a speaker (Google Home), and switch the playback device back to my phone via the Android app, playback stops and my queue disappears.

2. If I am playing on my PC, and I switch the playback device from my PC to my phone via the Android app, playback stops and my queue disappears. Spotify just shows some toast about being unable to play that track, but it's not track specific, it's any track. I have 22,000+ tracks in my library to choose from, and I have tried many.

3. If I am playing on my PC, and I switch the playback device from my PC to my phone via the Windows app, a whole new queue loads up and begins playing back on my phone. The queue I had on my PC is discarded and replaced with whatever queue my phone generated out of thin air.

4. If I am playing on my phone and I switch the the playback device from my Phone to my PC via the Android app, a whole new queue loads up and begins playing back on my PC. The queue I had on my phone is discarded and replaced with whatever queue my PC generated out of thin air.

Please do not suggest a clean install. I haven't had Spotify installed on anything for months, this is about as clean as you can get. Everything was installed fresh yesterday.

[Eni]

Hey there @gbai, 

Thanks for reaching out about this and welcome to the Community. 

Just to confirm, are both apps open (mobile and desktop) while you're listening to your Liked songs and switching devices? We'd also like to know if this happens when you switch to any other device as well or only between the two you mentioned. 

On another note, we'd recommend that you give another internet connection a go to see if the same happens. If you've been using WIFI, you can now create a hotspot on your phone and use that. 

Lastly, could you let us know if this started happening after a specific event such as an update? 

We'll be on the lookout.

[21ukn2p3rfj7ol45wyxj]

This happens to me on my normal playlists. I'd have to test if it's because of the big song count. But yeah if I'm playing a playlist on my Desktop Spotify app and then switch to continue playing on my Android device it continues playing to song that was playing no problem, but the queue resets to what is was when I first started listening to the playlist. I can even see the queue get reset if I open my Spotify app on Android and open the queue section when switching playback to my phone.

[gbai]

It started happening after I got my premium subscription, I also had to update the app so I did that too. Both apps are open and using my phone's hotspot doesn't fix it.
The same is happening when using a different phone and a different computer. I also tried using my phone's hotspot to connect those other two devices but the same happens.

Spotify for Windows (64 bit)
1.2.48.405.gf2c48e6f
Spotify android version 8.9.84.594

[Ivelina]

Thanks for the info @gbai.

What you're experiencing shouldn't be directly connected to the Premium subscription, but let's continue investigating together. If this happens across devices with your account and different internet connection, would you mind asking a relative or a friend to log in to their account on the devices and give it a test if the same behavior would persist?

On another note, let us know if you're streaming to an external device (such as a speaker for example) and if you've enabled Shuffle.

Welcome to the thread @21ukn2p3rfj7ol45wyxj! It'd be great if you could let us know what troubleshooting steps you've tried so far so we can avoid repeating them and the more details we have, the better.

Lastly, there seem to be other users that have reported a similar experience in this thread, so you can also take a look there.

We'll be on the lookout 🙂

[gbai]

I'm not really sure who to ask to log into their account on my devices.
I'm not streaming to an external device, though connecting to one and then changing the playback device makes the issue happen again. I haven't enabled shuffle.

[21ukn2p3rfj7ol45wyxj]

I've restarted my device, cleared cache and so on and tested what number of songs in a playlist makes this bug appear.

Restarting my phone and clearing cache didn't help, and the number of songs in a playlist for this to happen is as low as ~ 20 and lower. This issue happens specifically when shuffling a playlist. I've tested this on Windows PC to Android Phone and Windows PC to Windows PC and it seems to happen when either switching to or from Android playback where the queue gets reset to what it was when the playlist playback first started.

[jdtemple]

It has gotten frustration enough at this point that I have started replacing my Chromecast compatible speakers with Bluetooth ones. That still does not solve the device switching issue when you swap between phone and PC for playback.

Spotify Connect is broken.

[fidelinfidel]

Queue repopulating already heard or skipped songs when switching devices.

To reproduce, I have a Spotify playlist on shuffle without repeat turned on, I start playing the shuffled playlist on my windows app. I advance to a song further down in the queue, or simply let the queue advance naturally by listening to several songs from the list. I then connect via the android app using connect to a device and switch to this device from the android app. This causes the queue to re-add all the songs that I skipped, or that I had already listened to from the other device.

[berryflavoured]

Spoiler

Plan

Free/Premium

Country

Mexico

Device

(Huawei Matbook D 16)

Operating System

(Windows 10)

My Question or Issue

When changing devices from mi iPhone to my desktop player (windows) the queue changes to the same songs that have already played before, basically repeating the same queue over and over again. It only happens when I play music on the desktop player, the queue on my iPad, iPhone and web player remain unaffected if I change from multiple devices.

Plan

Premium

Country

Mexico

Device

(Huawei Matbook D 16)

Operating System

(Windows 10)

My Question or Issue

[lennyk108]

Same issue when switching from mobile phone to desktop app and back again.

Cleared cache, reinstalled everywhere, all on latest versions.  This is happening on most of my playlist.  Just tested on my "On Repeat" playlist which is on shuffle and only has 30 tracks. Regardless of playlist size, doesn't happen when shuffle is turned off.

[tonyb]

Hi, UK-based Premium user here (Windows desktop, Android on Samsung S10e - everything up to date)

In the last few weeks I've noticed that when I switch from listening to a playlist on Spotify on my phone to listening to the same playlist on my PC, the current song will continue playing as expected but then the queue will start from the beginning again instead of continuing with the original playlist order.

Can this action be reverted so the playlist order is preserved when switching device?

thanks

Tony

[ecqplsn-z5_4g]

I want to be able to queue songs on my computer, for example, and be able to open my phone later and have the queue available without needing to open them at the same time to sync them. It feel like it shouldn't be too hard to implement, it's like creating a 'playlist' and all that's needed is to save the songs/order.

For some reason there is always a disconnect when I play songs on my phone then get home and I find my computer hasn't progressed in the queue. Or, if I add songs to the queue on either device then go to listen on another device and the new songs aren't there.

[Chasethecw]

Plan

Premium

Country

United States

Device

Windows(Lenovo PC), Windows (AMD Chip/MSI PC Tower), Android (Pixel 6 Pro), Playstation 5 

My Question or Issue

When listening to a playlist on shuffle if you switch the playback to another device, the shuffle order breaks. It will continue playing the previous song but will then proceed to restart the playlist from the order that it was initiated in. So, if I am listening to a playlist on shuffle in my car (Android Device) and I switch the playback to my home PC, the last song played on the android device will continue playing, but then the first song in the shuffle will play again. Starting over and listening to the same songs I just listen to in the car. 

I hope I described that well enough for other to understand my frustration. 

[gbai]

Plan

Premium

Country

Spain

Device

POCO X3 NFC but happens on every other device I try

Operating System

MIUI 14 and Windows 10 but happens on every other OS I try

My Question or Issue

When playing any playlist with a lot of songs, at first everything works fine and I can switch between playing on my phone and my computer and the queue is synced between those two devices. But after like 100~ songs when playing for example through my computer if I try to switch and listen through my phone the queue starts from the beginning.

I have tried reinstalling Spotify both on my phone and on my computer, a clean install, turning offline mode off and on and signing out everywhere but so far nothing has worked.

I have also noticed that if I compare the queue from the desktop app, web app and android app, the desktop app and web app are synced but the android app isn't.

[gbai]

Oh and it started happening just after I got my premium subscription. Before that everything was working fine...

[BRB1993]

Plan

Premium

Country

Australia

Device

PC

Operating System

Windows 10

My Question or Issue

For the last few weeks, I've noticed that Spotify will constantly reset my queue if I close Spotify and/or restart/hibernate my PC. I've tried contacting Spotify support on Twitter. Unfortunately, their solutions haven't helped me thus far. I've tried a fresh install of Spotify, logging in and out, clearing the cache, redownloading my playlist, playing it through different devices and networks, creating a new playlist and adding the songs to it, unshuffling and reshuffling, turning off repeat, and so on. The playlist has 4,566 songs, so it shouldn't be a 'repeating' issue.

To give you a better idea, in the attached images, the playlist queue on the left is from roughly 48 hours ago. The 'now playing' song is the last song I had been listening to before I paused it. The songs in the queue had already played roughly 12 hours prior.

The playlist queue on the right is from my phone, playing through the Spotify app on my PC. Once again, the 'now playing' song is the last song I was listening to. However, the songs in the queue had played a few days ago. As of right now, the playlist on my phone has the correct and current queue. The issue is non-existent on the iOS version of Spotify, as far as I'm aware.

I've also attached the current and correct queue that's currently on my phone.

I'm unsure what could be causing this issue but I'm all out of ideas. The article that the Spotify support team sent me didn't feel relevant to my issue, so I think they're stumped as well.

[tonyb]

Update on this - After a full reset of phone app and desktop app, the observed behaviour stopped. However within a few days the same behaviour had resumed.

Does anyone have any suggestions to fully remedy this?

[DeathDemon]

Ever since this last update, whenever you go from your phone to the desktop app or vice versa, it will still play the current song but the next song is reverted back to the top of the queue. If I play song A, and get to song C on my phone, when I switch it back to my desktop app, it still plays song C but the next song is song A again instead of song D.
This is very annoying as I switch to my phone and computer a lot and I have to keep manually skipping songs to get back to where I was at in the playlist on my phone/PC. I have already tried reinstalling both apps, nothing worked. I contacted chat and they were also able to replicate the issue.

[DJ_Click]

Hi there,

Just like a number of users replying here, I'm getting this issue & have been for a number of weeks & its been driving me to frustration.

I've posted a number of times in the past about issues I've had with Spotify Connect, & I don't think the last couple of my issues were ever resolved to my satisfaction. However, I discovered that if I always tried to pull whatever I was playing on one of my other devices (generally my PC) at the time I stopped playing my music on that device, it would generally pick up my queue correctly from them. All that changed though in the last few weeks.

Device details are as follows. And I'm not sure if it matters but it occurred to me during this exercise that perhaps the fact that my home network is a mesh network could be a factor. I have 3 decos as follows

1. Living room (Primary connection)
2. cobra cave
3. Main bedroom

Unfortunately I turned my TV off before grabbing the details during the following exercise. When I turned it back on it connected to Living Room but I can't say for sure that it was connected to that deco throughout.

Device	Mesh connection	OS	App Version
Desktop	Ethernet to Living Room	Windows 10 (64 bit)	1.2.49.439.gfae492c7
Samsung Galaxy S22	See Test	Android 14	8.9.92.408
Samsung Q7 TV	Wifi to Living Room??	1341	2024.11.04_11-d359b2e E release-v2.184-2-g91d3575-mvhz HEAD-v3.194.71-gcc6495a7 2.1.10

During the course of this afternoon I performed the following tests. My apologies - the earlier tests I wasn't really paying attention to the details that I was later. For clarity, if I haven't specified the device I switched TO its the device I was using. I couldn't derive a pattern from the results but perhaps it might help your techos

Test	Step	Action	Result
0	1	Using phone switched from PC to TV	Didn’t reset
0	2	Using PC switched from PC to TV	Didn’t reset
0	3	Using phone switched from TV to PC	Maintained queue
0	4	Using PC switched from PC to TV	Maintained queue
0	5	Using PC switched from TV to phone	Maintained queue
0	6	Using phone switched to PC	Maintained queue
0	7	Using PC switched to phone	Maintained queue
0	8	Using PC switched to phone	Maintained queue
0	9	USED PHONE TO SWITCH FROM PC (TV app was off)	Reset queue & logged out of TV (can only log back in with code)

Test	Step	Action	Result
1	1	Using phone switched from PC to TV	Maintains queue
1	2	Using PC switched from PC to TV	Resets queue
1	3	Used phone to switch from PC while TV still on	Maintained queue

Test	Step	Action	Phone connected to	Result
2.1	1	Using phone switched from PC to TV	Living Room	Maintains queue
2.1	2	Using phone switched from TV	cobra cave	Maintains queue
2.1	3	Using PC switched from PC to TV	cobra cave	Maintains queue
2.1	4	Using PC switched from TV to PC	cobra cave	Resets queue & the song that was being played at 2.1.3!!

Test	Step	Action	Phone connected to	Result
2.2	0	Used Phone to switch from PC but was still playing the test from test 2.1.4 so can’t confirm if reset	N/A	N/A
2.2	1	Used phone to switch to PC	cobra cave	Resets queue
2.2	2	Using phone switched from PC to TV	cobra cave	Maintains queue
2.2	3	Using phone switched from TV to PC	cobra cave	Resets queue

[fredonzenet]

Hi

I Have notice  exactly the same issue with my long playlist (2500 songs) whatever the output device...

Delete cache or other troubleshooting steps do not change that

Regards