Data Usage on my Samsung Galaxy S4

[AndyBell]

I have been paying for and using Spotify now for a few months on my Samsung Galaxy S4. I know that as it is a streaming service that it will use up a large amount of data usage for each month of my phone plan. In previous months I can say that it has used up around 3/4 of my 1 Mbyte plan. Last Friday my phone plan data restarted so I decided to listen to Spotify on the way home on the train. When I got home I got a message from my telephone company that I had used over 50% of my data usage for the month. I was thinking that this was impossible and that they were incorrect. When I looked at the Data Usage area under the Android Settings I found that the phone had recorded data usage for Spotify of 680 Mbytes. My train journey was only 20 - 30 minuts and Spotify had already used up this amount of data. How can this be? Can someone please shed some light on what may have happened here? If I don't get this resolved I will be forced to cancel my subscription to Spotify or just use it offline. This will be a shame as I think it is a good service. Just to note that I have not downloaded any of my playlists during this time.

[Joe]

Let's do some quick calculations. Assuming you have set spotify to stream in extreme quality, that's 320kb/s or approximately 40KB/s.

So 30 mins x 60 x 40KB/s = 72,000 KB = 72 MB which is out from what you're reporting by a factor of 10 which is odd, Some of the difference could be accounted for by scrobbling to last.fm and facebook as well as buffering music in the cache but not that much. The other thing is that, packets would have been resent if the connection wasn't very good, I guess.

To be honest, a 1MB monthly plan is really not really adequate for streaming from spotify and I would recommend you download music over wifi to listen to offline when you're out and about. I have a 20GB monthly plan and I still monitor usage pretty carefully.

By the way, maths was never my strongest subject so maybe someone else will check that I haven't got ot wrong 🙂

[AndyBell]

I have used the default settings as they were when the Spotify App was installed.

Show on Facebook: ON

Last.fm Scrobbling: OFF

Streaming: Normal Quality

Download: Normal Quality

Most of the time I am using Spotify at home on my PC but I like to also listen on the train travelling to/from work.

As I said this is normally ok and the amount of time I use it on my phone the data usage is ok.

It just seems to be this one particular day that I cannot explain.

The settings I have set by default in Spotify would not explain the amount of download of this proportion.

BTW I have tried downloading to my phone while connected to WiFi but it says there is not enough space.

I have a 64 Gb card in the phone but there does not seem to be any setting to change the location of the storage.

It is just saving the downloaded playlists to the internal memory.

[Joe]

You can get spotify to use te external SD card as long as it has more free space than the internal storage by doing this:

• Clear the spotify cache and uninstall
• Using a file explorer app on your device, or your computer with your device connected over USB, look for a folder called com.spotify.mobile.android.ui - usually located in \Phone\Android\data\ and delete it.
• Reinstall spotify

You should then find that the cache folders have been placed on your external SD card and can download music to your heart's content. If you have any problems with this, please shout.

[AndyBell]

Thanks anyway but I would have thought Spotify should have located the 64 Gb card that was in my system when it was originally installed. I have cleared the cache, uninstalled and then tried locating the folder "com.spotify.mobile.androi.ui" in the folder \Phone\Android\data\. It does not exist.

I then tried reinstalling Spotify on my phone. I still could not see a folder called "com.spotify.mobile.androi.ui" either in the Phone or Card areas of my phone. Tried downloading a Playlist again but it has the syncing error due to not enough space again. Guess it is not "detecting" my 64 Gb card.

[Devroet]

Are you sure you set it to the correct path? It should be something like: storage/sdcard0 

[AndyBell]

Not sure what Spotify has been set to for the "correct path". That is not the main issue here, though. It is the fact that it used 600 Mbytes in less than 1/2 hour. I won't want to use it again on my phone if it is going to use up this much data in such a short period of time.

[Peter__]

The android app using a lot of data is unfortunately still an open bug (and has been for a while).

[Gyromite7]

I had a similar experience yesterday. I just started using Spotify as a trial user, and I streamed two albums via the Android app over 4G. When I checked my data usage, Spotify had used 2.5GB in just a few hours! Even streaming video wouldn't come close to that kind of data usage in the same time period. I saw the bug report thread, but it seemed that most were talking about hundreds of megabytes, not thousands. This is ridiculous; what is it downloading?! I've used Rhapsody's streaming service on Android and it was always very reasonable in using data.

[misakimi]

Hi...I've seen you post a few times about this file and I too cannot find it.When I then reinstall Spotify it appears to carry on using internal data. I have a 64gb Samsung MicroSD - which I can see in the file manager and so is functioning. The card has only just been put in - I got the Galaxy S4 just before Christmas. Any ideas?

[Joe]

Uninstalling the spotify app should now remove the music cache too but just to be on the safe side, before uninstalling it, go to the spotify settings and delete the cache from there. Then uninstall and reinstall.

If this doesn't work, reformat the external SD card in your phone and try the process again.