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Confused about free Spotify app on iPhone

C

California King

macrumors 65816
Original poster
Sep 20, 2007
1,066
8
I have a free Spotify account and installed both the desktop and mobile app. When I sign into my account on my iPhone and try to play a song, it says that only Premium users can do that. Ok, well, there's something else Free users can do; sync your songs that you already own on your computer to the Spotify app. So the syncing is not actually the copying of songs onto the iPhone, right?...Because you can just do that by syncing with iTunes.

Is it instead, scanning your music library and seeing what songs you have and allowing you to stream those songs using Spotify?
 
You can only play music from Spotify on your phone if you have paid for a Premium subscription. It doesn't matter if you already have the songs on your computer, you need a premium account.
 
I've been looking at the features list too and I'm confused... I haven't gotten invited yet, but still.

I can't even tell what I'm able to do with the app without Premium.
 
I think you can. I opened up the Spotify app on both my iPhone and desktop and the desktop app asked if I wanted to sync with my iPhone and I clicked yes and after scanning my local music files, I'm able to play the songs off the Spotify app on my iPhone. All songs that weren't synced are greyed out and when you press on it, it says you need a premium account.
 
California King said:
I think you can. I opened up the Spotify app on both my iPhone and desktop and the desktop app asked if I wanted to sync with my iPhone and I clicked yes and after scanning my local music files, I'm able to play the songs off the Spotify app on my iPhone. All songs that weren't synced are greyed out and when you press on it, it says you need a premium account.
Click to expand...

Then maybe I am mistaken. I'm sure it used to be limited to just Premium users no matter what though.

Not sure why you would want to use the PC application to do this if you are limited to 5 streams of each song ever as a free user.
 
I'm still trying to figure all of this out, but I believe the syncing the Spotify app was doing was actually just copying the music to my iPhone, not scanning and matching. Too bad, that would have been amazing!
 
i think your right California King, I'm pretty sure it is just a different way to sync your music with your phone instead of using iTunes for free users. When it first arrived in the UK they promoted it as a way of removing itunes so users of spotify could organize and sync their music as well as stream with the 1 desktop application rather than having 2 applications for own and streaming music but then the iphone app would only be able to play the music you have sync'd via the desktop app.
Spotify is really only great when you have the premium account, thats when the syncing via spotify makes sense, so you sync all your music via spotify and when listening to streaming music on the app when a track comes up that you have sync'd it plays the track stored on your phone rather than waste data streaming it, thus replacing the built in music player completely.
 
i'm confused... on the iPhone it says it needs to sync the music since i do not have a streaming account (got the free one for now) so i synced like 40 tracks yesterday, and today i tried syncing like 20 tracks and it only synced one ? wth ?
 
I am confused with this whole thing as well. I thought it just gave me a way to listen to my music on my iPhone without transferring it to the phone. Now that I am running this sync, I think I am actually transferring this entire playlist from my laptop to my phone. I DO NOT want to do this and now I don't know how to stop it and get all this crap off my phone! This whole playlist is not going to fit on my phone so it will completely fill my phone up, which will cause problems and sluggishness with my phone now. I am not a happy camper!

Also, something else that I might should have researched a little better before doing it but if I have installed the Spotify app on my MacBook, when I link to friends accounts and synch or whatever it is called with my iTunes on my laptop, am I putting another copy of the music on my computer? If that is what is happening here, again, I am not a happy camper and I now need to know how to make all these superfluous files go away without leaving traces on my new MacBook Pro! I have been so careful about what I have installed on this computer, trying not to install a lot of apps that I will never use and even deleting some things that I don't us so as to not take up the space. Now I am worried that I have defeated my efforts by signing up for this stupid music service without completely understanding what I as doing. Of course, it's my own dumb fault for not reading everything thoroughly before doing it but I've been reading so much about all the advantages that I neglected to consider the disadvantages!
 
It sounds like what you guys might be interested in is Audiogalaxy. It syncs all your music from your pc to the "cloud" so to speak and then you can listen to it on your phone. It does not copy your music to your phone. It has a great advantage over that feature in Spotify because Audiogalaxy doesn't care what file type you have or if it's DRM, AND it's a free service. You can get the app in the app store. I really like it. Let me know what you think.
 
severe said:
Same here. What gives?

I've read they're offering free unlimited access for the first 6 months.

Am I doing something wrong?
Click to expand...

that's their little catch. the free people are unlimited for 6 months on the desktop application. After 6 months it drops down to 10 hours per month and only 5 listens per song. If you go to second tier, which is $5/month, you get unlimited on the desktop app and no ads. If you go to the third tier, which is $10/month, you get unlimited on the desktop and mobile apps and no ads.
 
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eternlgladiator said:
that helps but it doesn't provide the finer details of the free membership and at what point it becomes very limited.

check this out. I couldn't find it in their site but it's there somewhere.

How Free is "Free"
Click to expand...

Good find.

I'm just planning on using it to preview albums before buying, so that's good enough for me. I guess I'll decide later if I want to rent music in order to listen to it on my iPhone, but at this point, I'm not feeling it.
 
Does anyone know how many devices, at the same time, can be online with a single account? In other words.. can two devices, under the same account, be playing at the same time?
 
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Yeah the only way the free account works for the iPhone is that you can wirelessly sync local music to your iPhone. However they won't be viewable in the iPod section of your iPhone. I created a playlist and called it my iPhone's name. Then I went into that playlist in the Spotify iOS app on my iPhone and turned on offline listening. This forces the Spotify desktop software to sync whatever local music you place in that playlist you created into your iPhone. Be forewarned though. 3 of the tracks I synced for some reason are the song for like 30 seconds but then revert into another song on the same file. Probably a hiccup during syncing.
 
ladymacintosh said:
It sounds like what you guys might be interested in is Audiogalaxy. It syncs all your music from your pc to the "cloud" so to speak and then you can listen to it on your phone. It does not copy your music to your phone. It has a great advantage over that feature in Spotify because Audiogalaxy doesn't care what file type you have or if it's DRM, AND it's a free service. You can get the app in the app store. I really like it. Let me know what you think.
Click to expand...

I <3 Audiogalaxy.
 
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