Spotify does not play track links from Facebook [Solved]

I never had a chance to figure out why I couldn’t play tracks  from Facebook or Spotify Play Button at home. After further research I found out that my DD-WRT flashed router had the “Deny DNS Rebinding” option enabled. Spotify needs to resolve *.spotilocal.com to 127.0.0.1.

In order to resolve it, I added this command to the DD-WRT startup options:

sed -i ‘s/stop-dns-rebind//g’ /tmp/dnsmasq.conf
killall dnsmasq
dnsmasq –conf-file=/tmp/dnsmasq.conf

Everything is good now, fortunately.

 

Latest release of Spotify for Android

Spotify has a preview release for Android downloadable from their website. I have been using it for a few days now and I am pretty happy with the enhancements.

Annoying bugs/issues that I experienced with the previous release, now fixed:

  • App Crashing every time a song was added to a playlist.
  • Gap between songs that made continuous mixes terrible to listen to.
  • No  “similar artists” feature.

Official List of enhancements:

  • Totally new app with full support for Android 4.0
  • Top-to-bottom redesign
  • All-new slide-out navigation
  • Even more social – check out friends’ profile pages and playlists on the go
  • Artist imagery in high resolution
  • Related artist view – available for the first time on mobile
  • ‘Extreme’ sound quality setting for 320kbps listening
  • So much faster

Features that will be added to the final release:

  • Last.fm scrobblling
  • Folder support

You can download the preview version here.

Enjoy!

Source: Spotify blog.

 

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

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

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.