Music downloading to SD card, yet still taking up internal storage space (Galaxy S7/Nougat).

[RJM403]

Greetings,

Hello, 

I've been using a Galaxy S7 with Spotify for a few months now. I've never been able to get my music to save to the micro SD card. Last night I upgraded to Nougat 7.0. I did a complete device wipe with the new update and was hoping this would resolve these problems. It didn't. 

Here's what's happening: If I use a file explorer to view my files, it appears Spotify music is indeed saving to my micro SD card. It seems the music files live here: SD Card -> data -> com.spotify.music -> files -> spotifycache -> storage.

I've looked around on the internal storage and can't seem to find any music files saved from Spotify. Yet, any music I download offline seems to eat up my internal storage. If I have 6GB of music stored offline, Spotify shows as 6GB app when I review "internal storage" under system settings. 

I've done the following to try to fix this:

-Completely uninstalled Spotify

-Reformatted micro SD card using the phone's format tool

-Logged out of all online devices

-Reinstalled the app after completely wiping it off the phone

-Confirmed Spotify settings indicate music downloads to SD card (the app defaulted to this).

I'm using a Galaxy S7 Edge. Android version 7.0.

What's going on here? Is the phone downloading the music twice? I can't find any offline music stored to the internal storage, yet downloads to the SD card seem to eat up internal storage too. 

Any suggestions would be appreciated. 

[Joe]

It's just an anomaly in the way the storage is reported probably because the cache is not regarded as application data. Nothing to worry about although I did report this here.

[RJM403]

Well, it seems this bug tricks the phone into thinking it's internal storage is filling up when it isn't... which effectively consumes my internal storage. 

Is there no fix then?

[Joe]

Why do you think that? The internal storage used as reported in settings>storage does not include the spotify cache on SD. The only bug is the purely cosmetic one of the storage used reported in the app screen.

I even downloaded more GB of music than the free internal storage I had and there was no problem.

As I said, nothing to worry about but you can always open a new bug topic. I gave up when, rather than checking for themselves, they were starting to ask me to try ridiculous and irrelevant "solutions".

[RJM403]

I don't think it's purely cosmetic. My phone has only 32GB of internal storage. If I installed 30GB of content (outside of Spotify, general apps and documents, etc...) and then attempted to download 5GB of music in Spotify, the phone will report being full (when it apparently isn't?) and not allow me to install use any more internal storage. 

As I download more music, more phone is reporting less and less available internal storage. This isn't a cosmetic issue. As far as I can tell, the phone thinks it's internal storage is filling up with Spotify music when it actualy isn't. 

[Joe]

I tested this, you're just guessing. Download 32GB of offline music and see what happens.

Alternatively raise a new bug topic or contact spotify direct (best of luck with that).

[RJM403]

That's true. I'll download a ton of music and report back. I hope you're right. Thanks for the help.

[ChrisNeal]

But it is something to worry about when your phone won't update apps anymore saying it's out of internal storage, when you know there is plenty available. Spotify needs to answer/resolve this

[ChrisNeal]

And, if you delete the offline playlists from SD card you get that space back but the internal space remains lost.

[RJM403]

You are correct, despite the way it's displaying the ever-increasing app size as I download music to the SD card, it doesn't seem to be reducing the overall internal storage available.

An annoying bug nonetheless. Thanks for the info. 

[Joe]

Thanks for confirming that. I was starting to doubt my menory 🙂

[Joe]

---

@ChrisNeal wrote:
But it is something to worry about when your phone won't update apps anymore saying it's out of internal storage, when you know there is plenty available. Spotify needs to answer/resolve this

---

Hey, can you just confirm the exact error message you see when you try to update apps? I suspect this is more likely to be a shortage of RAM and not internal storage. You'll need to delete or move apps to external storage to free up space. Apps are stored in RAM (or SD card if moved) and their data is stored in internal or external storage.

[ChrisNeal]

It's definitely internal storage not RAM. The message I got was
"Insufficient space to update ", and under Storage & USB in
Settings my internal storage was indeed showing nearly full e.g. 11.46Gb of
12.1Gb used. However I knew that 4Gb of that 11.46 was the Spotify offline
data that was actually stored ONLY on the external SD card. Since then I
have done a factory reset, and on completing setup and restoring my apps
Spotify appeared to be working properly. I could see that the offline data
was consuming space on extSD only, but then some time later I checked again
and the problem had returned: my available internal storage had reduced by
the same amount. I'm about to try again with some more testing and will let
you know the outcome.

[Joe]

I'm not going to argue with you @ChrisNeal. I'll just say once more that apps are installed in RAM which is also used by the android system. The "insufficient space" error is most common on older phones which can have as little as 2GB of RAM. Apps are not installed in internal storage - you're just misinterpreting what you see.

You should also note that everyone else who has noticed the incorrect storage usage reported in the app manager is unaffected by this in a practical sense. Check out what RJM403 just posted.

So I'm going to duck out of this and suggest you contact Spotify using the online contact form. If you get an automated response directing you back to the community or to the help pages, please reply to it by email and you will hear back from one of the team shortly.

[ChrisNeal]

It's definitely not RAM. Each time I got that message (and apologies for not mentioning this before) I could get around it by deleting the cached files to free up internal storage. Immediately after that the app updates would work because there was more internal storage available.

I will use the contact form to report this to Spotify.

Chris

[rjsalamanca]

I have the same problem. P9 Lite with Micro SD installed.

I have no option to download music to SD Card. Last night I started to download some playlists and my internal storage began to decrease.

Please help.

[blaxoid]

Same problem here - Galaxy S7 Edge.

To the poster saying it's a RAM issue - I suggest you do some reading on what RAM actually is. This is an issue with the way Spotify reports it's usage to the OS, or a bug in Android around how it interprets it. 

[chrispoole]

Hi Chris

Just wondering, did you find a fix for the problem you were experiencing? I am having the same thing happen to my phone.

Cheers

Chris 

[Andrebot]

Anyone got this fixed?? First I lost a SD card due to Spotify corrupting it.... Now with the new one, when I set it as Storage in the app it still takes up internal storage! It saves the files to the SD card AND internally... Annoying... 

[Zsaeed90]

Any luck with this. I noticed this issue my self and it is getting annoying since. I can't donwload anything on phone because I keep being told my storage is full. When I delete the app data it just deletes my saved offline playlist and then I have to redownlad it and the same issue appears again.