Spotify is my choice for music enjoyment when I run or travel. But even though the service boasts millions of songs, it doesn’t have everything I want. I have CDs and MP3 files that are no longer available or were never available to streaming services. When I want to hear those files, but don’t want to bother with yet another music player on my Android device, what do I do?
I add the files locally.
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Fortunately, Spotify and Android make this task easy enough that anyone can make it work. And I’m going to show you just how to do it, so you can enjoy all the music you want, whether you’re at your computer or not.
Adding local files to Spotify
What you’ll need: To make this work you’ll need the Spotify app installed on your Android device (which you can do from the Google Play Store) and some music (MP3, MP4, or FLAC formats work great) to add.
The first thing you’ll need to do is add music to your Android device. This is the only step that can be a bit tricky. How I do this is to upload the MP3, MP4, or FLAC files to a Music folder (I created) in Google Drive. Then, using the Google Drive app on Android, I download those files to my phone.
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There are plenty of other ways to do this, but this is the easiest way I’ve found. Of course, if you purchase music on your phone (from sites like Amazon), as long as the music files are in your Android Download folder (you can check this using the Files app), you’re good to go.
Open the Spotify app and tap your profile photo in the upper left corner. From the slide-out sidebar, tap Settings and privacy.
Tap Settings and privacy. Jack Wallen/ZDNET
In the Settings window, scroll down until you see the Local Files section. Tap the On/Off slider until it’s in the On position.
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You will then be prompted to allow Spotify access to music and audio on the device. Tap Allow to finish enabling the feature.
After tapping the On/Off slider, you’ll then have to allow Spotify the necessary permissions. Jack Wallen/ZDNET
Now that you have your files on the device and local file support enabled on Spotify, go back to the main Spotify screen and tap Library. In the resulting screen, you should see the Local Files entry. Tap that and then tap play to listen to your locally stored files.
Open your Library to find the Local Files section. Jack Wallen/ZDNET
This is a great way to listen to any audio file you have saved to the Downloads folder on your Android device.
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As long as the file is in a supported format, you shouldn’t have any problems enjoying those out-of-print, unavailable, or original audio files while on the go.
