Spotify now

After sorting the errant telly and the podcast puzzle, more or less, I am now tasking my tired old non techie brain towards Spotify.

My son in Thailand, when I said I wanted a playlist of seamlessly following chosen music for my Android to lull me to sleep at night, immeduiately said ‘Spotify’. Google it, follow the instructions and away you go.

Trouble is the tiny writing and touchscreen keyboard on my Android is too taxing for my eyes and fingers so I signed up for a free trial of Premium on the PC. No problem, even tested it with a couple of suitable tunes to kick off my playlist. But before I add any more I want to make sure if I can transfer it to the Android.

It seems to recognise me as an account holder but after that it takes me round and round in circles, a far too familiar position for me these days with anything not connected to steam or diesel.

So does anybody have any suggestions, it may well be that the Android is too old but how can I tell what version it is?

Off to bed now to hopefully drop off first to The Archers and then to a truncated 1950s version of Desert Island Discs featuring Margaret Lockwood as the guest. I do remember her and her choice of fairly soothing music is just the job, if a little too short, something to do with ‘rights’. :roll_eyes:

Spotify holds all your data in one mysterious place, you have no need to know where. So as long as you can sign in to your Spotify account from a gadget then you will access your data.

So you could create a playlist from your PC. Sign out then log in from Android and access the very same playlist.

You have the problem right there Graemel, no matter how I try I can’t log in to Spotify on my Android tablet. It knows who I am because at one point it mentioned my user name, and at another point it invited me to log in and then said my device was unsupported.
I have tried without success to find the version of my tablet so don’t know if that is the problem, I have had it a few years.
I am beginning to think the tablet, Asus Android, is the problem.

You are not alone…

Make sure you read page 2 (don’t do factory reset) , it seems that for these users the SD card trick solved the problem

Thank you, I’ll check the sd card trick, but tomorrow, wasted enough time already on it today.
Off to check one more thing on my pc. I have a Spotify playlist with half a dozen pieces of music on it but I notice that when it plays the last one it goes back to the beginning, of the last track, not the list. I do not want either as the whole idea is to play me to sleep at night, after which I want it to stop. :roll_eyes:

Edit: Spotify gets dafter, the solution to the autoplay problem is supposed to be settings/autoplay/off from the drop down menu under my username. But all that is offered is Accounts or Profile. No settings there or anywhere else.

This 3 month free trial is looking more and more likely to be shorter. :rofl:

Not that proficient on spotify and also ended the demo early. The quality or lack of it put me off as did the disapearing of my playlist at the end of the demo. In the end I started building up my cd’s from ebay and ripping them to my devices.

If you can bear to buy CD’s from Amazon : Going back from the present to more than 15 years ago, if they’ve got the electronic/MP3 version of the same CD you can download the electronic version of the same CD free of charge directly from Amazon. Even if you didn’t at the time of purchase.

The electronic version of CD’s I bought my mother was even found in my account! I got my Matt Monroe ones and wished I hadn’t bought the rest of his that I have, from Tesco. Mum can keep Bobby Rydell.

MP3 is a highly compressed format that sounds terrible next to a CD version.

This is something of a lengthy quest for me. All I want is half an hour’s gentle music which will play until after I drop off to sleep since I gave up reading in bed which is a bad thing, screens anyway, which means Kindle, according to Michael Mosely as reported in my insomnia thread.

I have some CDs and a small CD player but, unused for some years, it doesn’t seem to work anymore, likewise the player in my laptop, recently discarded in favour of this new PC, and the radio part of the CD player.

Tried Classic FM and Musique playing all night, very softly, acceptable but a right carry on shovelling coal into the steam laptop, it takes about 20 minutes and has to be watched for every one of them.

The Asus Android is good enough for 15 minutes of The Archers but of course I want to hear that, so the drifting off has to be done to music afterwards. If I can’t sort this problem with Spotify, and soon, I will be onto Amazon fr for a cheapo player. :roll_eyes:

Can you not use windows media player or VLC player on the tablet?

I don’t know, but I doubt it, but in any case I find it very difficult to use with its small text and touch screen buttons.

It was originally bought some years back when I was still travelling far and wide with the dogs. When my laptop at the time broke down I bought it to get emails on the road by calling into McDos once a day to get them. But I found it too long winded and difficult for the reasons stated so in the end told everyone I knew that they might have to wait a few days for answers to emails and gave them my mobile number for texts instead, Even replies to them were very brief unless important.

I’ll try Spotify’s rather poor help service tomorrow to try and solve both problems but don’t have much hope of getting anywhere. If not I’ll cancel straight away and buy a cd player at the same time.

Job done, easier than I expected, instead of going through the Spotify site where asking for help only produces loads of options other than the one I want, I simply typed Spotify Help into my search box and got to a chat advisor immediately.

I asked how I could turn off Autoplay as there was no option to do so where they said there was and the reply came that it is not an option. So I asked for, and was granted, immediate cancellation of the free trial and that there would be no payment taken in July and also accepted the offer of a transcript of the conversation by email.

So, option 2, back to Amazon FR where I have already found a suitable CD player/radio with remote control for €40, or put another way 4 months worth of Spotify though admittedly with less choice of music. Not a problem for me, I only want half a dozen for sleep inducement. :joy:

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Now David has his solution I feel it’s ok to derail a little. MP3 compression is variable, and an audio stream can be squeezed within an inch of it’s life, or left given much less compression and remain almost indistinguishable from the original - very much depending on the equipment used for playback. One could also debate the quality of audio and compression of music from CDs if one were picky. :wink:

If only I could understand one tiny portion of what you said, AM, I wouldn’t have to come here and ask questions. :rofl:

I got as far as derail and, with visions of railway engines in mind, was immediately derailed myself. :rofl:

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Yes agree, I think we know David was looking at a low end solution rather than audiophile. Spotify have been criticised for age for not going into hi res as the bandwidth and storage would treble at best.
They use a very low bitrate. That said a huge amount of music is upscaled from very low quality source material and the industry tells some terrible porkies.

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Well after being unsure of all the diffrent players on the market I came back to the one I have and which appeared to be not working. After pressing away till I got the right ones (part of the problem was a mucky window showing the track number) I finally got it to work, though the radio tuner was a bit basic to say the least.

Anyway got Piaf at full blast and as the volume control does not go low enough for my needs, dug out a Glenn Miller cd, and I have that playing on minimum at the moment. Whether it is quiet enough for going to sleep music I will see tonight, but at least I can choose how long it plays for before I want it to shut up. And what better than that magic sound, missing from my life for so many years, to drift off to. :joy:

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Glenn Miller :slight_smile: . We used to dance to that, fond memories.

Tried it out for my siesta yesterday afternoon. Way too loud, so at bed time I stuck it in a drawer, closed all but for a tiny gap for the cable…perfect. Dropped off to sleep well before the 15 tracks ended and a very good, uninterrupted night’s sleep ensued. :joy:

So next thing is to dig out all my CDs, unused for years, and pick the most relaxing of them, or buy one or two more of my favourite themes. Favourites are Mefanwy, Sleepy Lagoon, Sailing By (my Mum, true to her family seafaring tradition, always listened to the Shipping Forecast and this before sleep), The Duet from The Pearl Fishers and a few others.

I have done some research to try and find a suitable alternative to Spotify, but no luck. The info is sparse and no chance to ask my must have answered questions - Can I use it on my Android tablet and, more importantly, will it shut down at the end of the playlist. I don’t mind paying because I definitely don’t want ads, so for the time being, it is the CD player in a drawer. :rofl:

Have you looked at Deezer? TBH I havent but it seems to feature in a lot of places.

Yes, I found a site which featured at least a dozen such services but none of them answered the questions I have nor did they offer any opportunity to ask them. Of course my understanding of the language used (shuffle, skip etc) might be something other than they mean. :astonished: :smiley: