Some songs in my offline playlists are blank

[nigmarc]

Some songs in my offline playlists are blank. They are blank even when I'm online. I've tried un-downloading the playlist and then downloading again but no change. I've also noticed I can't skip through these songs by dragging through it on the position indicator like I can with any other songs. Has anyone come across this? I can't find any search results for this in the forum.
I recently upgraded from a Galaxy S3 to an S4. I had this issue on my old S3 and now have exactly the same on my S4.

[Joe · Accepted solution]

Do you mean they are shown in your playlist but are greyed-out? Do you get an error message when you tap one of these to play?

It sounds like these may be local files (mp3 files on your PC) and won't play on android until you synch them. If you could post a link to an affected playlists (right click on playlist name in desktop client and copy spotify URI) I'll have a look.

If they appear normally and just won't play on your android but play in the desktop client, try reinstalling spotify.

[robrobles13]

I am having the same problem as well. I have a few songs that were local (on my PC) and now my Android shows them as greyed-out. How do you sync them so that I can listen to them on my phone?

Thanx

Rob

[Joe]

Just follow the steps in the FAQ @robrobles13 and shout if you have any problems 🙂

[nigmarc]

thanks joe for the quick reply

the tracks look normal in the playlist (android and desktop) - they are not geyed out.  they play normally, they are just ompletly silent (and i can't skip through them at all).

reinstalling spotify on the android has corrected this.  if it happens in the future it woudl be nice to avoid this, each time i reinstall it counts as another offline device and i've now had to resync my ipad as well.  is there any other way of completly un-downloading a playlist (or clearing cache?) rather than a complete re-install?

i think i may have an idea why this is happening.  i think i might have partially narrowed it down to the following process:

- i have an offline playlist of songs from the twittermusic app

- i go through that and star any i like

- i go back and add a new playlist made up of albums of those starred tracks to then listen to the whole album

- when i do this i unstar the tracks

- i make this playlist available offline

- the tracks that were starred are now silent

i've noted this on at least 3 songs.  i also think it happened to some others that did not follow this process, but am not positive.

none of these relate to local files, i don't use them at all  if it helps, this is the playlist and these are some songs that were blanks:

New to check out - April 2014

Villagers - Occupy your mind

Chloe Howl - Rumour

thanks!

[Joe]

Thanks for the link - I don't see anything strange there at all. You can always undownload a playlist from a long touch on the playlist name. At the moment I can't think why the way you process your music would have an effect unless your starred playlist is also available offline on android. In that case, it's possible that unstarring a song will undownload it from android and possibly cause problems with another playlist containing the track.

I shall ponder this for a while and get back to you.

[obeewan]

Did you finish pondering about this? Since the issue still exists. 

Its like what, https://community.spotify.com/t5/Spotify-Ideas/Spotify-downloads-blank-songs/idi-p/729665, says. Bad internetconnection when downloading means blank songs. And I for one cant get it working if I unmark the playlist as downloaded and redownload since it uses the cache. 

The only method that works is to clear the cache of ALL downloads (yey!) then redownload. Which takes me forever.

[Joe]

Please use the online contact form and someone at Spotify can help get this sorted. If you get an automated response directing you back to the community or to the help pages, please reply to it to speed things along.