Monthly Archives: December 2011

Having Spotify playing through two devices simultaneously with one premium account [mobile]

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I was a little disappointed at first when I learned that I could not have more than 1 mobile device playing songs via Spotify, just the way I can do with Netflix. There are instances where my son wants to listen at home while I want to do the same at work. He is too young to have his own account and it is not worth paying another $10/month for just having him play whenever he wants to, in my opinion.

Luckily, there is a way to work it around. Offline playlists. But you need to follow additional steps:

  1. Enable the playlists of your choice for offline sync. Wait until they are all synched up (I recommend it as an overnight task).
  2. Once all synced up, fire up Spotify.
  3. Go to preferences, select “Offline mode”
  4. Play your favorite music.
  5. The other device can now stream from the cloud without disrupting your session.

I have not tried it with 3 or 4 devices, but the process should be similar. Spotify Premium supports up to 3 devices in offline mode (and the PC or laptop being the fourth in “Online” mode).

 

How to Recover a Spotify Playlist

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I love Spotify. in fact I use it on a daily basis. My wife and son use it every now an then, mostly through an Android Smartphone.

Lately, I’ve been hit with a flaw that Spotify needs to address: deleted playlists. Granted, they happened maybe because my son inadvertently deleted them. The fact is, once you delete a playlist, all songs are gone.

There is a way to get it back if you use Spotify on more than 1 PC or laptop:

  1. Locate the desktop or laptop that is currently offline that has been synchronized with Spotify previously.
  2. If it’s in sleep mode or hibernating force shut/down and restart by deleting restoration data. If you do not perform so, Spotify might fire up right after the device resumes and resync all playlists, removing the deleted one.
  3. After restarting disable all network connectivity. Wireless and/or wired.
  4. Open Spotify. It will do so in offline mode.
  5. Create a brand new playlist.
  6. Locate the playlist that was deleted.
  7. Copy all the contents to the new playlist you just created.
  8. Enable network connectivity.
  9. You will see that the deleted Playlist will disappear.
  10. Rename the newly created playlist with the name the deleted one had.

There are other ways to restore playlists but unfortunately didn’t apply to me as I have around 50 of them. Not easy to spot the file name of the missing playlist.

Lesson learned: I will always keep more than 1 device synchronized to Spotify.