The Latest Update – 17th July 2012
The most recent version of the Spotify Android does not allow you to specify an external SD location. For me and many others this makes Premium a bit rubbish with the offline space limited to your phones on board memory and fighting for space with your applications and other data. I’d advise everyone to send spotify an email at [email protected] and make known your displeasure.
Workaround
There is a workaround as commented by Mike below. “A work around until Spotify updates. I found on the Spotify community pages that if you install the old version before the update that originally worked with locating an ext SD card, and go through the set up before signing in and selecting the ext SD card. Then just update Spotify to the latest from the google play market and login. Seem’s to be working for me now.”
I’ve made the old version downloadable here: https://www.dropbox.com/s/8uvb6oadx4hzsux/SpotifyAndroid.apk
Note that although this version will crash when logging in on the Samsung Galaxy S3 but it will still allow you to configure the SD card location before you login. Do this and then update. Worked for me!
I asked Spotify for an official comment on this and advised them on the large numbers of viewers this particular page gets (on average 1800 unique views a month) and here is their far from useful response.
Yes you are right the new App does not support external SD cards and only focuses on internal systems. I am very sorry that your needs are not covered by this and I will happily forward your request to our development team. We do everything to provide the best possible service to our customers and aim to cover all demands and needs. I would also like to thank you for bringing this to us because it will support our development cycle
I am switching my account from the £9.99 premium addition to the £4.99 unlimited version for two months to show my displeasure with this development decision and urge others to do likewise as well as contact Spotify at [email protected] – I do want to support the fantastic music sales model that is Spotify but only if it actually works. In this day and age I’m sure they could do better.
For those using the old Spotify Application
Ahh I love Spotify, and I love Spotify Premium even more. Nothing better than plugging in the phone in the car and letting Spotify provide the tunes. I got the Spotify update the other day, finally allowing me to use an external SD card for the spotify music cache. I had some problems getting it to work but thanks to other Spotify users and a bit of fiddling I got working, eventually.
This post should help regardless of what model you are using.
Remove Spotify
You absolutely need to completely remove Spotify from your Android phone. Failing to remove it properly seems to leave a configuration file that messes things up. Some users have actually done a factory reset to fix this. No need, just do all of the following :-
- Uninstall Spotify from your Android packages menu.
- Connect the phone to your PC via USB
- Manually Delete any spotify directories (usually a spotify or spotify2 directory) via your computer
Note: For those that keep getting logged out and/or losing the SD Card setting. It seems there is a hidden xml file in the dbdata folder (which we can’t get access to unless your phone has root access) called spotify_preferences.xml
You need to delete this file before the sd card will save the sd card preferences correctly. Besides rooting your phone and deleting this, the easiest method is to completely factory reset your Samsung. :(
Reinstall Spotify
Re-download Spotify from the Android market place.
Select the External SD Location
Startup Spotify but do not login yet.
Before logging in click the menu button, this example shows the menu button on a Samsung Galaxy S. You get the idea. This is truly an odd place to stick a menu but there it is, I can only assume this was due to the architecture of the program, a cache file needs to exist before the user logs in.
Selecting the menu will bring up two options, select the SD Location option.
You will be prompted to enter the path to the SD card.
Enter the External SD Location for your particular phone.
Locations so far:-
If yours is not listed then go to the next step
Samsung Galaxy S : /mnt/sdcard/external_sd
LG P990 2X : /mnt/sdcard/_ExternalSD
Now login and check the Disk Usage option, it should now change to reflect the space on your external SD card.
Finding the External SD Card Location
If you are not sure what the correct path for the SD location is then try the following :-
- Download Astro File Manager from the market place.
- Connect your phone to your computer via USB and copy any random file to your external SD card ( I suggest a text file with an easy to spot name like i_am_here.txt )
- Disconnect the USB
- Open Astro File Manager
- Now try and find the file you uploaded, the directory will be similar to one of the directories shown in the previous step (i.e. /mnt/sdcard/_ExternalSD)
- When you find the file the correct path to your SD card will be shown at the top of the application.
Please post External SD paths for your phone model below to help others. Thanks :)