Songs greyed out although they are downloaded?

[LeoDGO]

Hey, I have a couple of songs in my playlist that although they are downloaded (and are played normally if I press on them), they appear as unavailable (or grey) and they dont play in sequence with other songs, they are skipped, is this a bug? How can I solve this? I already tried reinstalling the app and redownloading the whole playlist.

[LeoDGO]

Anyone?

[Jᴀᴄᴋ]

Hi Leo and welcome to the Spotify Community,

I am not exactly sure what this could be, but I would suggest uninstalling the songs and then reinstalling them onto your account, or you could also try uninstalling the entire app again and then reinstalling it if the first option does not work. Hope I could have helped. Let me know if you need any other help.

Best of Luck to you,

Jack

Spoiler

If this Helped you go ahead and give me a like 🙂 Or if it was the answer you were looking for, hit the solution button for others to see!

P.S. I am not a Spotify Employee.

[Jᴀᴄᴋ]

HI Again, I just figured it out, 

The reason that they turn grey is because it means it is the current song that is being played. I don't think it changes anything, it is puerly cosmetic to show that is the current song playing. If a different bug persists, Let me know.

Best,

Jack

Spoiler

If this Helped you go ahead and give me a like 🙂 Or if it was the answer you were looking for, hit the solution button for others to see!

P.S. I am not a Spotify Employee.

[crisperrgk]

Hey, anyone get an answer to this? I have the same issue and it's not an indication that the song is being played. I'd love for this to be fixed. I have hundreds of songs downloaded. Not trying reinstall stuff if possible 

[Petya]

Hey @LeoDGO,

Thanks for reaching out to us! 

Usually when there's an issue with playing your downloaded content it could be an indication that the cache is corrupted.

The easiest and fastest fix to this is to:

1.  Disconnect your devices for offline listening. 
2. Do a clean reinstall. 

Let me know if this fixed it for you 🙂 Keeping my fingers crossed!

[Tofuman]

The method above only solves it temporarily. The moment that you updated a playlist, some of the songs become greyed out again. It infuriated me to no ends that I'm thinking to switch to Apple Music. This problem has been going on for so long that Spotify never recognized.

The highlighted songs are downloaded to my phone through syncing from my computer. Some of the songs remain available to be played, some are just outright greyed out. It happened randomly to any of the downloaded songs after clean reinstall and updating the playlist. Please fix this.

[AndruA]

Just letting you know that I’ve had this problem for years and despite the fact that I know that any local file needs to be synced for offline playback on the desktop app and my phone. The truth is Spotify will never fix this. They’re not interested in making it easier or convenient for us to listen to our own music. If a song is not available on their platform, they prefer we forget that it ever existed. 

[Ver]

Hey folks,

Thanks for getting in touch with us.

If the grayed songs are local files, they might be in an unsupported format. You can look up the types of files that are supported here.

If the songs are in a supported format, you ca give these steps a go and run a clean reinstall, This one is more thorough than the usual reinstall. That way you can make sure the app is up-to-date and the cache is not causing any issues.

Hope this helps. If you have more questions, we are here for you.

[Tofuman]

Don't you understand the meaning of temporarily? It will happen again randomly in the future, god knows how long it will take...10 minutes? A week? Bah, I switched to Apple Music and I couldn't be more relief.

[user-removed]

I have had this same problem for 3 years on 4 different devices both iOS and Android. It’s really f annoying since I invested in high capacity devices for music on the go and pay Spotify monthly for a feature that has never worked properly, hundreds of people had the same problem with and nobody who works at Spotify cares about enough to bother even reading what the original person wrote before replying with basic smartphone troubleshooting skills.

This problem where 20-40% of downloaded content is unplayable within even a few hours or so after downloading is BS. What’s worse is that the Spotify app will attempt to re-download the greyed out content when it connects to Wi-Fi. Then a few hours later a whole bunch of stuff is greyed out again, then it attempts to re-download over Wi-Fi again and again. This cycle repeats over and over again day after day. Every time I open my Spotify app on Wi-Fi it has to re-download like 300 songs that are already downloaded, says they are downloaded, then a few hours later another 300 or so songs are greyed out, yet I have 60GB of storage free on my phone so that’s not the issue.  This constant pointless re-downloading sometimes twice a day is a huge waste of battery power and unnecessary writes to the internal storage.

Do the people who work for Spotify even use it?

Thanks

[Alex]

Hi there @user-removed,

Thanks for the post.

Sorry to hear that you're having such issues with the app.

The Spotify app will always try to sync up your playlists when connected to the internet, which means that it will re-download all playlists on which 'Download' is enabled. This is in order to assure that you always have the latest version of your playlist, in case you've made changes while offline or using another device. There is no setting that would disable this.

Regarding the unplayable content - does this happen with Local files or with regular songs from the Spotify library?

Keep us posted.

[anms]

Hello, it happens to me as well, but I get all the songs greyed out so I cannot use Spotify at all while I don't have a connection which is incredibly annoying as I don't have access to the internet all the time. These are songs only from Spotify playlists, not local files. Once I reconnect and disconnect the files are available if I keep the music playing but as soon as I try to change a playlist or stop music the songs are greyed out again and I cannot play anything at all...

[Dian]

Hey @anms,

Thanks for posting in the Community.

Could you tell us where are you playing the songs from? Are the songs you want to play downloaded for offline listening? If you're using the app without an internet connection, you'll have to download the content first. Is this the case?

Here is a reminder on how to use the offline mode of the app. 

Let us know how that went,

Cheers!

[gristleniche]

The fix for me was to rename the file on my phone. It will keep whatever its original name was in Spotify, but will no longer be greyed out. Hope this helps.

[Eriko44]

Happens all the time, i have uninstalled spotify and redownloaded the playlists, still not working... 

[Susan_GP]

HI @Eriko44,

Thanks for your reply in this thread. 

Are you able to play the songs, but they are greyed out? Or are you not able to play the songs at all? If possible, send over a screenshot or recording of the behavior. You can attach it in your next reply in mp4 format, or you can also upload it to YouTube or Google Drive and make it public.

On another note, are the songs greyed out across devices? If you haven't checked, try logging in with your account on a different device or the Web Player and take a look. 

We'll keep an eye out for your reply.

[gristleniche]

I believe this issue only really applies to whichever devices the songs are downloaded on.

For me, a simple toggle fixed it:

Just locate the file of the song that is greyed out in your device's files (My Files on Samsung) and rename (hold down on the file and the option to rename should appear). The song returns to normal on Spotify and keeps the same name on Spotify, regardless of what you change it to in My Files.