Making playlists with local files available online- for friends and Amazon Echo

[SamOsborn]

I've been making playlists on iTunes for ages, and just made the switch Spotify as my primary music player.

I was pleased with how easy it is to move my carefully crafted mp3 playlists into Spotify, and continue to edit and add from a much bigger library than I had on iTunes. However, I have yet to discover a good way to make these playlists sync fully and become sharable online.

I can, and do, download these playlists to my phone and listen offline (truly great!). The three times this becomes a problem are:

1) if I suggest a playlist to a friend, they won't be able to play any local files without downloading the entire playlist.

2) My Amazon Echo can't play playlists with local files 😞

3) I am on wifi and want to stream a playlist in my Library that is not downloaded onto my phone or tablet. 

I know I could just remake these playlists by finding the tracks on Spotify, but many are 10 hours or more of music, and I just don't want to spend the time. In doing a bit of reseearch it seemed like there was a useful webtool that did exactly this, but it was discontinued months ago, so I appeal to the hip masses. It also seems like Spotify is getting really close to knowing what songs are on my playlist, it just can't quite take the final step away from "local files".

Here is an example: 

Spotify has clearly "found" most of the songs in this playlist- and can redirect me to the artist and album as found on Spotify. There are a handful of grey tracks, and I know those will forever be local files, that's fine.

However, at the moment I can't play this playlist on an Amazon Echo, or share it with friends for online listening, despite the fact that at least 90% of the tracks are "synced/found" (read: white) on Spotify.

How can I make this iTunes playlist truly available online? Is there a faster way than rebuilding it by searching for each track individually?


(ps- I would love to add my own artwork and descriptions to my personal playlists. I know that is unrelated)

[Daniel]

Hi there, I'm afraid in regards to local tracks - unfortunately only devices which have these downloaded to them (PC, phone etc) can play them. The way the Echo works is that your phone send the echo to the polaylist on the Spotify servers which it then streams... Currently there is no way to play to it direct from a device - as such local files cannot be played.

Same applies for other users and sharing.


In regards to editing (annotating) a playlist; please see the idea linked below for updates... I suggest you add kudos to the idea to show your support.

https://community.spotify.com/t5/Live-Ideas/Customization-of-playlists-cover-and-description-box/idi...