Offline mode not working on Galaxy S5

[Stefan72]

Description

Offline mode does not work: playback of songs from downloaded playlists does not work anymore. Looks like the song is playing but i have no audio. Only songs (part of songs) which i listened to in online-mode before have audio in the offline-mode.

What are the steps you took to get to the error/issue?

(We need to know what you are doing so we can do the exact same to try and get the same error)

Open Spotify on Android

activate offline mode

Select a random playlist (synced and previously downloaded for offline usage)

start playback of a song

playback starts (time is running) - but no audio

What I expected to happen

normal playback of my downloaded playlists

Did you restart your device when troubleshooting in section B?

Yes

Did you read the connection troubleshooting tips?

Yes

Your device

Samsung Galaxy S5

Device’s Operating System

Android 4.4.2

What type of account do you have?

Premium

(FYI for the below points: Android devices tend to refer to the internal memory as "SD Card" and the SD card you inserted yourself as "External SD Card")

Space left on your device

Space left on your SD card (if applicable)

676 MB

Space left on your External SD card (if applicable)

32 GB

Is your device rooted?

If you don’t know what this means you can probably answer “No” (And skip the next question)

No 

Are you using a custom ROM, if so which one, exactly?

If you don’t know what this means you can probably answer “No”

No 

Did you set your external SD card as storage location?

Yes

Did you manually install an older version before installing the latest version from the Play Store?

No

Do you have the same issue when switching between WiFi/Mobile Data (If applicable)?

Yes

If you said "No", when does the issue not occur?

When using WiFi, 2G, 3G, 4G

My mobile Spotify version

2.0.0.702

My desktop Spotify version (if applicable)

-

My mobile provider and country

Vodafone Germany

My username

1169121118

Do you have a Spotify (non-Facebook) login?

I.e. can you log in on the site without using your Facebook details

No 

Are you logging in with Facebook or with your Spotify login details?

Facebook login

Do you have any screenshots you can attach to more clearly explain your issue?

If so, please paste them here

[Stefan72]

updated to Lollipop, no change ...

[Stefan72 · Accepted solution]

Finally i managed to solve the problem!

To sum up my problem: i encountered similar issues that were reported by other users here in the forum as well:

- playlists i downloaded for offline usage suddenly disappeared so i had to re-download them

- some offline-playlists played well only in online mode (though i downloaded them and the songs showed up as downloaded)

- playing offline-playlists, that showed up as downloaded, and were played in off-line mode seemed to work (playing time of songs was running) but there was no audio.

After a lot of investigations (upgrading to lollipop, using other devices, switching to cyanogenmod, full re-installation and so on - i had the solution:

in my case the problem was a defect sd card ...

this seems to be a known problem with sandisks micro sd cards:  sometimes they get broken only after a few month of usage. Problem is that you sometimes do not notice that the card is broken. My 64GB card with 20GB free seemed to work well: i could copy/ download files to it, could delete them, was able to transfere them via USB to my laptop and so on. Some apps showed up a strange behavior but i never thought that this would be a problem with the sd card.

I first noticed that there must be something wrong as i tried to format the sd card. Using several ways, even as root user, the sd card was not formatted. I got the indication that the formatting worked fine - but the files on the card were still there ...

After googling this strange behavior and seeing other people having the same issue i made some tests:

- removing the sd card and have spotify use only internal memory

- using an android tablet without external memory

- plugging some other sd card to my phone

-> in all of those cases spotify worked fine

After thinking about canceling spotify and switching to deezer, i'm happy again with my new external sd card (128GB!)

hope to help