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Comment by tomhschmidt | Hacker News Reader

+1. Ability to upload music on Google Play Music is also keeping me from switching to Spotify. I have a lot of tracks that simply aren't in the Spotify catalog. If they add that, I'd switch tomorrow.

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I'm blown away that the solution for this has been the shitty "local playlist sync" solution for years at this point.

I guess I'm in a niche? For me, there are tons of hiphop mixtapes that will never be on Spotify that I definitely need in my music player of choice.

Hell, Spotify won't even let me import local MP3 files from my phone!

I just stopped listening to music that doesn't exist in Spotify.

I fought it for a while with local playlist syncing and such, but just wasn't worth it over time. There's enough other music out there that I gave up trying.

You should give YouTube Music a try. It has both the "regular" catalog you'd expect from Spotify (high quality audio, organised by albums, etc.) + more indy bands that publish their music on YouTube.

I hit this issue with a lot of video game/movie soundtracks (Battlestar Galactica and Starbound OSTs are some of my favorite programming music), and it's extremely frustrating. Even worse, Spotify's app doesn't work on my work VPN, forcing me to use the web app... which doesn't support listening to user tracks since Spotify won't store them in its own cloud.

I pay them $10/month for service, so why can't they reserve a couple gigs of space to store my files that they don't have in their library?

... until Google Play Music goes the way of Google Reader :'(

I thought this was a feature already?

https://support.spotify.com/is/using_spotify/features/listen...

Or are you referring to something different?

The problem is that, according to your documentation, local music has to be on a desktop (the only way to listen to local music on mobile is to be connected to the same WiFi of a desktop that serves that music (!)). Which I think defeats the purpose of having your music on the go.

You can still add local tracks to playlists and sync those playlists to your phone. I have plenty of albums that don't exist in Spotify's cloud that I bring with me on my phone as "downloaded" playlists.

Yeah this might seriously make me considering switching from my current half-baked solution of GPM and Pandora, but I still feel discovery is better on Pandora (and that's saying a lot because Pandora leaves a _lot_ to be desired).

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