Spotify keeps automatically switching downloads to internal storage

[flut1]

I have a Samsung phone with about 8gb of internal storage and a 64gb external sd card. Naturally I would want to store my Spotify downloads om my external sd card. This seems to work fine for a while, but shortly after Spotify automatically switches to internal storage. This has the following effects:

- my internal sd fills up to the point that my device is not functioning properly (as there is not much free space left on my internal storage)
- I immediately lose all the downloads on my sd card. Even when I switch back the storage to external sd all my previous downloads are gone.
- Sometimes I have to manually recheck all things in my library that I want downloaded, which is a very annoying process that costs me a lot of time

This keeps happening every time I restore my downloads. It takes anywhere between a couple of hours to 2 days for the issue to arise again. My other apps don't seem to have any issues with reading from my external sd.

I have reset or reinstalled the app multiple times but the issue persists. As a side-effect of me reinstalling the app so many times, Spotify had also sometimes removed all my downloads because it thought I had downloaded to more than 3 devices (which in reality was just the same device added multiple times).

Is there any way to prevent Spotify from automatically switching to my internal sd? If Spotify has an issue with reading my sd card, I would prefer they would notify me and ask me if I want to switch to internal storage instead of doing so automatically.
When it does switch, is there any way for me to let Spotify switch back to the caching files on my external sd? The files are still there, but as soon as I switch spotify to external storage it just wipes everything that's already there.

Any help is greatly appreciated. I use Spotify alot so it is really frustrating to run into this issue on a daily basis.

[flut1]

Some additional info: I'm running Android 5.1.1. I've had this issue happen once every couple of weeks for a long time, but the frequency of this issue seemed to have skyrocketed ever since the option to move to another storage was added to the settings menu.

[Nomeansno]

Same thing here..... god I'm tired of all this save to SD stuff.... been have trouble all year...

[johnka]

Same here.

[jdclark76]

Having the same problem on my LG.  Seems to be resetting to internal storage each time the app updates.

[fei-ye]

Same here. It is just so annoying that each time I had to change it back to SD card and re-download everything again.

Any idea why this is happening?  This has to stop cause I'm getting really anxious when receiving insufficient storage alerts......

[johnka]

*Bump*

[WalleniusWilhem]

Same. Spotify appears to let you choose SD vs internal storage... then ignores you and unilaterally switches back to internal without asking or even telling you. Even when there isn't enough room on the device internal storage. Not too clever. First you know is you have no music and are not near a connection to redownload everything. Which is really boring to do anyway, especially after the tenth time. It even forgets which albums you downloaded vs just saved. You never know when it will strike. I can't put up with it anymore... I will carry on with Spotify until it happens next time, then I'm out.

[msichal]

Just please, solve that F problem. I keep losing my limited LTE/3G data and wasting my battery life because you can't even tell that the darn thing again decided to switch to a internal memory ERASING ALL THE MUSIC from the SD card, which requires not only switching it back to SD card, but redownloading all the music (in my case, like 600 songs in best quality).
I'm waiting another week, if this won't get fixed, I'm just switching to another streaming music provider which probably has more qualified programmers and staff on their help forums.
Thank you. This app is terrible.

Best regards.

[MrThunderMakeR]

This happens to me all the time and I'm getting sick of it.  And their solution is always the same: clear everything and do a fresh install. Well then I definitely have to re-download all my music. That's the f'ing problem, not the solution you idiots.  Spotify seriously has some of the worst programmers.  Why does it constantly re-set to internal storage after every update?  Why when you set it back to sd card storage does it not recognize the music that is already there?  These are two very simple programming mistakes.  Get your #*&# together Spotify, I'm not paying premium membership fees for this kind of **bleep** service and programming.

[Nomeansno]

Done last week.... moved to google music and cancelled Spotify. No familly plan, the impossibility to save anything on the SD card and the fact that Spotify just don't give a sh... about their customers, just killed it for me. For the last 1.5 year I haven't been able to save anything properly on the SD card! That's 18 mounths without one single usefull update! Anyway, after each updates, Spotify would forget about my SD card and all the music on it, go back to the phone memory, fill it up completely and then crash.

Don't really like google but the kids love it. Still can't figure out why it's not possible to save-like and artist on google??? Anyway, it is done and for those of you who are afraid to leave Spotify, don't forget that you will still have access to the free version. Usefull for at least make sure you transfered all your artists on google. I compared the choices on each and Google got way better in the last year, up to the point it has basically the same choices as Spotify, just not the same albums sometimes.... tested them with old punk rock 🙂

Googd luck with Spotify and scre... you Spotify.

[Gamedex1983]

This has been happening to me too. Im on a Flash Plus 2 phone, running on Android 6.0. I have little space left in my internal memory, so I opted to use my SD-card for my offline tracks. 

Spotify this is getting quite annoying. I hope you get around in fixing this.

Thank you.

[Gamedex1983]

To add to what I have posted, everytime this happens, my settings reverts back to default ( Normal Quality downloads and streaming, instead of my preference of Extreme Quality).

I have read somewhere in the forums from another user that the same happened to him too.

Spotify please fix this.

Thanks.

[ess-eh]

If you look at other forums based on this same topic, you'll see that this issue has been going on for more than a couple years. Why is there still no fix? Time to switch to Google Play. 

[johnka]

Same here. Most of the time (or all the time, I'm not sure) I need to log
in anew. I did a clean reinstall a few weeks ago since this was the
suggested solution. It didn't prevent the bug from reappearing. Happens
quite often, so if a developer would like me to log it somehow it should be
possible. I have not figured out how to reproduce it consistently though.

[Gamedex1983]

Well, to be honest, the issue on this thread, including the settings reverting back to normal settings ( streaming and download ), never happened to me on an older device running on Kitkat, and may have happened once on another device while I was on Lollipop. But it has been frequently, and annoyingly happening on Marshmallow.

[johnka]

Ok. I'm on lollipop. Can't remember if it occurred on kitkat or not.

[zekececil14]

There is a limited and temporary fix to not having to re-download every song. It does NOT completely solve the issue, as it will continue to happen. It just saves a lot of time.

When it switches to the internal storage, it basically adds a file in that storage to tell where everything is. All of the other information on the external SD is STILL THERE.

If you go into your settings and look at storage, you will notice that it switched from the external you chose, but the memory is still being used by the songs. If you try to switch back, it says it "moves" everything over, but what it really does is clear any previous spotify data and moves that file to the external storage.

After Spotify switches on you to the unwanted internal storage, you need to go into settings and clear the cache. When you startup spotify again, it will find the existing file on the external storage that never went away. 

When you go to re-download your songs, a large percentage of them will already be there. They just have to re-authenticate themselves. They already exist in memory. You won't have to re-download every single one of them.

Just remember to set your download quality to what you had it at before you select the download option.

I get this ridiculous error frequently, and I use this method to prevent myself from being forced to re-download from 0.

[Gamedex1983]

UP for this. I just tried it, and it DID WORK for me. To be clear, since my last comment about this problem, I was reluctant to redownload everything. I just listened to my fave songs without downloading. 

So I did follow what zekececil14 described, by first going to settings>storage. I was still at internal, and spotify is still occupying a good amount of space in my external, so I know those were my downloaded songs. I set streaming and download quality to extreme quality ( it wasnt set to that ) and I went on to delete cache and saved data while the storage is still at internal. That asked me to relogin when spotify relaunched.

After logging back in, checked settings>storage again, now its on to external. Checked my playlists, had to toggle the Download slide / button / whatchamacallit, and it marked all the songs in a playlist as "Downloaded" in like 3-5 secs.

Thank you zekececil14. It doesn't address the "why" it reverts back to internal storage, but it is a fix nonetheless.

Thanks again.

[johnka]

Thanks for the tip @zekececil14 ! I will definitely try this next time
around.