Premium
Country Canada
Device
Laptop and nVidia Shield
Operating System
(Windows and nVidia Shield)
My Question or Issue
I have over 6,000 local files on my laptop. I connected them to Spotify desktop. I use the Android TV operating system on my nVidia Shield, and as Spotify for Android TV is useless for me (no local files, artist and albums not in alphabetical order), I've sideloaded the regular Android Spotify phone app and used another app called Set Orientation, to force landscape. I works great. The music sounds so much better on my shield.
On Spotify desktop I added all 6,000+ local songs to a playlist called Local Music and downloaded the songs in this playlist on my shield. Now, using my now synced Local Music playlist on Spotify Desktop, I'm in the process of creating a system of folders and playlists. I have one principal folder called Artists With Local Music and another called Various Artists Local Albums (for albums with multiple artists). Under Artists With Local Music, I'm creating folders for each artist with local music and in within the artist folders, will be playlists for each album found in my Local Music playlist, along with a playlist called All Songs, where I will add all of an artist songs (even the ones on Spotify).
So I've been busy scrolling down my Local Music playlist (sorted by album), selecting the songs in each album and adding each of them to a new playlist which will automatically be titled "artist name – song title". Every five or so albums, I go to the left panel, create a folder for each artist whose album playlist I just created (if not already done) and create the artist's All Songs playlist (using "Create Similar Playlist" and changing the title), if not already done. Then I move the album playlist and the All Songs playlist into the artist folder. I then move these new folders and album playlists of artists with previously created folders into the top of my Artists With Local Music folder and move the new stuff around accordingly, keeping everything in alphabetical order, changing the name of an artist with "The" in it's name to "Artist Name (The)".
If the new album playlist has songs by multiple artists, I move it into Various Artists Local Albums. No sub-folders are necessary here.
So when I go to my nVidea Shield, everything is perfect and would stay perfect , if I never play any music! The folders are all in alphabetical order, as are the playlists inside the folder and the songs are in the order they were originally presented by the artist.
When I open an artist folder, open an album playlist and play a song, is when all **bleep** breaks loose. Because I've now played a song in an album playlist within an artist's folder, that folder now appears at the top of of my Artists With Local Music folder . Also, the song, if not the first in the album, now appears at the top of my album playlist. If I played several songs by different artists, my beautiful system, organized so I can find things easily. is blown to **bleep** by Spotify, because they insist on identifying recently played and moving everything involving recently played songs to the top of folders and playlists.
So my question is , if Spotify must **bleep** into my organized system, like they do, how long does a song remain in recently played songs? How long a time period is recent? And will the affected sub-folders and out of order songs , in a playlist, on my Android app revert back to their proper place, once the songs are no longer "recently played"?
Two other advantages of using the sideloaded Android app on my shield, are
1) There is an option to like all songs on a Spotify album at once, instead of clicking the heart beside each song on the desktop version.
2) I can add my local songs to my liked songs and eventually shuffle my entire collection of songs (from Spotify and local).
I wish there was a way to either opt out of Recently Played or not have my folders and playlists affected by recently played. I'm putting so much work into this after opting to move from Google Play Music/Youtube music which is a total mess. I'd love to feel it was all worth it, when I'm done.
I'm sorry that this has been so long, but I needed to express myself.