@bugsandblaze I've visited this thread prior for my duplicating local files problem, now checking it for the second time to make sure I hadn't missed anything, and seeing there's another person who's having trouble I wanted to leave a comment. Yours and the initial poster's problem are identical to mine, and I have put multiple hours into trying to fix this issue. I've looked at all the threads from Spotify and anywhere else about people who have this issue, tried every combination of restarting and redownloading and resorting files on both my PC and phone, and I've come to the conclusion that at a certain point there's genuinely nothing you can do about it. Not to say that this is the case for all local file issues, but for this specific one (certain local files duplicating, the files from your computer greyed out on your phone while other duplicate files exist fine) I'm almost certain it is completely impossible to fix, unless Spotify fixes it in an update. The problem is that every time you resync your files between devices, the phone will create a *different* version of those songs in its files that isn't lined up with the ones on the PC. These songs only exist on the phone and are greyed out on the computer (and vice versa, the original files from the computer are greyed out on the phone because they don't actually get downloaded), effectively duplicating those files in your library should you want to listen to them on both devices. Why this happens, and only happens to certain songs, I have no clue; some of the duplicating songs had metadata which at some point I changed or added to make it accurate, and I think that may have messed some process up somewhere, but some songs I hadn't touched whatsoever. Maybe try completely deleting the local files off your computer, deleting the files in %LOCALAPPDATA%\Microsoft\Media Player to make sure any trace of them is gone, and then restart Windows Media Player (any necessary files in that path will be automatically generated back when it starts again) before redownloading and resyncing your local files, so you know there's no file/path issues. It helped me for one song, but otherwise I've had no success.
I know it's a complex exchange of information between phone and PC even when both go through Spotify, and it can be tricky if you have a Windows PC with an iPhone as many of us do, since a Mac would probably have better compatibility with the phone for this stuff. But regardless, I think it's insane that a service as big as Spotify hasn't fixed this issue, and it's far from the only problem that syncing music with local files has; the function as a whole is very tedious and doesn't have much care put into it. It's very clear local files are a small afterthought to them because it doesn't benefit them financially but for I and many others they're a really great way to have normally inaccessible music next to all the stuff you've saved from the app. Not to be all righteous about it but it's so frustrating not to have a fix for this and it's genuinely making me consider using another streaming service because this one doesn't seem to care much about its listener base
Staff / Moderator/ 3 years ago in Social & Random