Spotify ignores track numbers - fails to download local files properly

[C3rb]

Hi!

I have audio books as local files on the format "Artist - Title - CD # - track #". All works well on desktop when I add the files to a playlist, but when I download the list to mobile I get the first track of each CD repeated. The last part of the title which also is the actual track number identified by windows does not make an appearance and I get:

CD 1 track 1 

CD 1 track 1 

CD 1 track 1

CD 2 track 1

CD 2 track 1

CD 2 track 1

etc.

While this is appears to fundamentally be about Spotify not being able to read track #, it's very weird to me that the list somehow fails to download properly to mobile when it works on desktop. Even mass renaming the files to "title (1), title (2)" evades Spotify as title is a character string and can't be sorted.

Has anyone found a way around this? I'm not up for renaming 300+ files in windows..

[Joe]

Is the meta data correct as in CD number and track number? I seem to recall this issue coming up years ago but as it's pretty niche, I don't think it was fixed. Make sure the meta data is correct and, if spotify still won't play nicely, you'll have to bite the bullet and renumber the tracks consecutively as if they're all on one CD. There are plenty of tools which can do this for you so it's not that time consuming.

[C3rb]

Thank you for your reply!

All the metadata is correct. It works fine on desktop, but I suspect that just has to do with adding the files in the right order. I noticed after posting that the title also is grabbed from the file metadata. This is where we run into problems as title alone isn't sufficient to differentiate tracks. So we get:

1. Spotify ignores track #

2. Spotify uses the title from the file metadata, but ignores track # making the track names ambigious and thus fails to download the correct files.

I agree that having the same title for all tracks is a niche case. Still, as long as it's according to the metadata standard being used I wouldn't call it a niche issue that Spotify ignores data required to make the other data meaningful. I get that character string+integer is a rough task to handle proper sorting for, but being able to at least differentiate the tracks would go a long way. Using third-party apps in order to essentially ruin proper metadata used by other platforms isn't the most intuitive or best practice approach as I see it.