Cross-device play issues

[nwslap12]

Plan

Premium

Country

USA

Device

Macbook pro, windows pc, iphone

Operating System

iOS, windows 10

My Question or Issue

I have persistent issues when operating Spotify with my current setup.

My output device is a windows 10 PC. While working, I control spotify via my work machine, a macbook pro. Both devices are running the spotify desktop app all day.

My issues:
1. Playing a dynamically generated playlist (like spotify's daylist, for example) will play different music on the windows PC compared to what the mac application is showing on the playlist. I think it is playing an older version of the playlist on the output device. Sometimes I will try to manually play a certain song by selecting it on the macbook, and playback will stop entirely, with the app showing no visual change.

2. When I open the macbook for the first time that day, it will often show outdated playlists on the home page, or not load the home page at all. Restarting the app often results in an updated home page, but cause the playlist sync issue in #1

3. Sometimes playing a specific song in a generated playlist will play an entirely different song (related to #1), or fail to play at all.

All of these issues require a restart of the app on the output (windows) machine, and then a restart on the macbook afterwards. Only then are my playlists synced and playback works as expected

[Elena]

Hey @nwslap12,

Thanks for your post and the info!

To start, if you haven't already we recommend giving the app a clean reinstall both on the MacBook, as well as on your Windows PC. This can help resolve different issues with Spotify's performance and is different than a quick reinstall. You can go ahead and follow the steps under Mac and Windows 10 here. 

Keep us posted.

[nwslap12]

Hi @Elena,

I reinstalled on both devices following the provided instructions. Did not notice the issue yesterday, but today I go to play my daylist from macbook labeled "vaporwave synthwave wednesday afternoon" after selecting windows pc as the playback device. Instead, I got soft piano music.

Checking the Spotify app running on windows, I see the daylist is labeled "calm piano wednesday afternoon". When I click the daylist, it suddenly updated to match "vaporwave synthwave wednesday afternoon". At that point I can skip to next song and it begins playing from the expected "vaporwave synthwave wednesday afternoon" as shown on the screen.

I think the issue is that certain auto-generated playlists, set to refresh on a schedule, do not refresh across all devices unless you use each device's app instance to renew the cache. I would expect that a playlist is updated across all devices, allowing me to play the music shown on the playlist regardless of selected output device.

[Yordan]

Thanks for the info @nwslap12!

Could you check if the issue persists after installing Spotify on both devices from our website?

What you can also try is the Web Player on your MacBook instead of the Spotify app to see if the same behavior would occur.

Let us know how it goes.

[nwslap12]

Hi Yordan! Both installations are from the website.

I encountered a related, but different bug today. While playing my daylist with the same setup as usual, a song which was not on the list began playing. Visually, on the macbook, the playback was paused at the last song on the list. The playback controls did not function on the macbook. I tried to change output device to "reset" and got an error message "sorry, spotify cannot play this right now", or something approximate to that.

This was eventually solved with the usual method of restarting both application instances before resuming playback from the windows pc directly.

I will try using the web player on macbook and report back

[nwslap12]

The issue is still here when using web player on macbook to control app on windows.
The issue with playback buttons sometimes being unresponsive is also still present

[MihailY]

Hey @nwslap12,

Thanks for the additional info.

This might very well be caused by an issue with your account. Would it be possible to test with a new one or ask a friend/relative to log in on both devices?

Let us know how it goes.

[nwslap12]

I'm afraid I can't perform testing of that type right now. It would be difficult in the first place as the most common trigger of this bug is an extended (1 hour +) break from using the application.

I will sum up all of the behavior I've seen as concisely as possible:

Setup involves a Windows PC used as output device via the "Connect to a Device" menu in the lower right
Playback controlled via Macbook. I've also tried using iPhone as a control device when encountering the bug, does not seem to make a difference.

Bug 1:
Playing a "temporary" playlist such as daylist or daily mix, from Macbook, sometimes plays music not shown on the playlist. Typically this seems to be the contents of the playlist from an older "update". For example, daylist might have been Jazz several hours ago and is now Rap. Playing the Rap daylist from Macbook will actually play Jazz on the output device.
This happens when I click the "play" button on the playlist. Typically the UI will show the song being played (In this example, the Jazz song) and all playback controls work as expected. The only issue is the mismatch between what I expected to play, and what I am hearing.

If I try to manually play a song from the playlist by clicking on that individual song, I will often encounter bug #2:

Bug 2:
Typically occurs from the sequence described above. Spotify is unable to play the song I clicked for some reason. All playback controls are inoperable. The main pause/play button shows the "play" arrow, indicating playback was never started. I often can't use the app at all when this happens, and am forced to restart the app.


I always solve this problem by restarting both apps, however it is getting annoying. I think this is somehow related to how the apps cache these playlists, maybe it is tied to the particular app instance instead of the account overall.

Please let me know if you need any more info

[Vasil]

Hey @nwslap12,

Thank you for the detailed info!

We are currently not getting any similar reports and we did not succeed with reproducing the issue, which leads us to believe this is something caused either by the specific account or some device-specific settings.
Sadly there's not much else we can currently do from here.

Do keep us posted on how things go though and we'll be on the lookout for similar reports in case it turns out this is something on our end 🙂 
Much appreciated! 

[statik1]

This behavior between multiple systems still exists today.  I have Spotify on my work MacBook and two personal Windows 11 PCs.  One of my PCs has the larger speaker setup I want Spotify to play through ("Spotify connect" and controls it from the other PC or my work MacBook).  If I don't restart all my Spotify apps across each computer every day, the curated playlists (Daily Mix 1/2/3/4/5/6, Discover Weekly, Time Capsule, My Daylist etc etc etc) do not sync and the Play button on Spotify greys out.  Its like you need to refresh the playlist by clicking on it so it will update.  If both curated playlist are not refreshed ie my windows 11 PC has my "Day List" that is 24 hours old my work Macbook updates and then everything is out of sync.  Spotify either needs to "PUSH" (like how email/phone notifications work) across all devices connected to a common account.  I know the community helpers on here are driven by how many threads they can "mark closed" because of "solution they provided". There is no solution this needs Product Management review and added to upcoming release as a "FIX?

[nwslap12]

Thank you for the additional report. I agree the playlist updates need to be pushed to clients if they are not already. It's obvious that each client instance tracks its own record of the curated playlists and are not updated in sync with the server. Although community managers are not motivated to push for a fix here, it needs engineering attention as this is clearly not something customers can fix

[Flexo013]

I can confirm that this issue also occurs between Spotify Desktop (Windows and Linux) and Spotify Mobile (Android). My partner and I have the same issue. Spotify on desktop displays one version of the daylist, and Spotify on mobile displays a different version of that daylist (same link).

This desync causes issues when trying to control playback cross-devices.

[divineraccoon]

"We are currently not getting any similar reports and we did not succeed with reproducing the issue"

Straight up a lie, for years.

[alohadfxugu]

Hi.

I have similar problem but my second unsynced device is Wiim pro plus. On the phone i have totally different type of music than on wiim. Basically i cannot listen daylist playlist on my audio system. listening on the phone is not fun.

This problem persists in different occasions. Radios for example have some songs different and looks like different version of the same radio.

Please Spotify do something about it. 

[Flexo013]

People have shared way to consistently reproduce this issue. Could you share this info with the team that look into this issue?