Some songs from iTunes won't play

[ajspurs]

I've synced Spotify with my iTunes library (i.e. I've imported all my iTunes playlists to Spotify), but lots of the songs (maybe a quarter of the total) have not transferred successfullly. These songs show up in Spotify but are greyed out and when I click on them it says 'Track not Synced ' (on iPad) or 'This track was added as a local file. If you have the file on your computer you can import it.' (on my Mac desktop).

What gives? It's clearly not anything to do with the format of the files, as some songs from a single album won't play while others from the same album, downloaded to iTunes at the same time in the same way, will. Anyone know how to fix this? It's really annoying.

Thanks.

Andrew

[ajspurs]

Apologies for bumping my own post, but nobody's replying. 

To add ... I have 8000 songs in iTunes, but only 5033 are recognised in Spotify (on the iPad app). As mentioned it's not a formatting issue, because songs from one album, downloaded to iTunes all at the same time are unplayable whereas others from the same album play fine.

Would appreciate anybody's thoughts on this. It's the one thing in Spotify which is really causing me grief. 

[Joe]

Sorry your original post got missed.

If you have imported your itunes music into the desktop client and they all show under "local files" as well as the playlists, you're almost there.

The playlists will show on your mobile device and the music will stream from the spotify servers, as long as the tracks are available in the spotify database. For music which isn't available on spotify, the tracks will appear greyed out and you will get an error message if you try to play them.

For music which isn't available on Spotify, you will need to synch the tracks to your mobile device before you can play them - just follow the instructions in this FAQ.

[ajspurs]

Thanks for your reply.

Hmm ... so I would have to do this one playlist at a time? Could be a long process. And this doesn't answer the issue where some songs from the same album are unplayable. Surely Spotify doesn't have partial albums in its database?

[Joe · Accepted solution]

It does have partial albums - music licencing is bizarre. It may also be that it just can't match a tracks metadata for some reason even though the track exists in its database. You can either make individual playlists available offline on your mobile or you can select your device in the left panel of the desktop client then check the playlists you want synched which may be quicker if there are a lot of them.

[ajspurs]

OK, that's helpful. Thanks.

[pbechard]

I noticed that some songs appeared unplayable (darked out) in spotify that were purchased and in my itunes library. I think it has to do with Digital Rights Management. The itunes songs I purchased from itunes before the time when all purchases were DRM-free are not able to be played in Spotify. Hope this helps anyone else who gets to this post...

I wasted many dollars purchasing music, considering now, the subscription based options ;(.