Bit of background - for years, my primary music source has been a maintained .mp3 music collection on my PC, and since I've had a smartphone, it's also been copied onto an SD card so I can listen to it on the go. I also had a free Spotify account which I used to supplement this when I was at work - given that I have a limited mobile data connection (now 3GB), I've never bothered with streaming using the app, and just relied on local content on my phone.
I'd been thinking of switching to premium Spotify so I could get access to a lot more content directly, and took them up on their 3 months/99p offer which is on at the moment. Doing a bit of reading, it seems like you can also "sync" your local content to Spotify, and then it should integrate seamlessly - so if you search for a song, and you have it as a local file, it plays it locally rather than streaming. Cracking - that should be great for me, I can keep listening to most of what I own locally, then choose to download new stuff, all through a single player/library.
However, two big problems with this - one is that you are limited to a maximum of 3,333 downloaded tracks per device you use.
The second problem is, that the Android app doesn't let you sync local files from the phone itself - instead, you have to sync the files on the desktop PC, save them to a playlist, then go to the phone app, select that playlist and mark it for offline use. The app then downloads these files (despite the fact they are already sitting on the SD card) onto your phone. But of course, because Spotify sees this as downloaded content, it counts towards the max download limit - and I have just under 5000 tracks in my music library :/
This seemingly arbitrary limit and inability to use the Android app to properly sync local content from the phone's SD card pretty much prevents me doing what I want with Spotify - but I do enjoy having access to the streaming service when I'm bored of my own collection.
So are there any other alternatives to Spotify which also allow integration with your local file content in this way?
I'd been thinking of switching to premium Spotify so I could get access to a lot more content directly, and took them up on their 3 months/99p offer which is on at the moment. Doing a bit of reading, it seems like you can also "sync" your local content to Spotify, and then it should integrate seamlessly - so if you search for a song, and you have it as a local file, it plays it locally rather than streaming. Cracking - that should be great for me, I can keep listening to most of what I own locally, then choose to download new stuff, all through a single player/library.
However, two big problems with this - one is that you are limited to a maximum of 3,333 downloaded tracks per device you use.
The second problem is, that the Android app doesn't let you sync local files from the phone itself - instead, you have to sync the files on the desktop PC, save them to a playlist, then go to the phone app, select that playlist and mark it for offline use. The app then downloads these files (despite the fact they are already sitting on the SD card) onto your phone. But of course, because Spotify sees this as downloaded content, it counts towards the max download limit - and I have just under 5000 tracks in my music library :/
This seemingly arbitrary limit and inability to use the Android app to properly sync local content from the phone's SD card pretty much prevents me doing what I want with Spotify - but I do enjoy having access to the streaming service when I'm bored of my own collection.
So are there any other alternatives to Spotify which also allow integration with your local file content in this way?
