Using an SD card is a must
If you aren’t already using an SD card with your device, what’s stopping you? An SD card is a powerful tool not just for Spotify but for our increasingly mobile lives. SD cards are dirt cheap at this point, and many phones and tablets come with them by default. If you have an SD card, Spotify will automatically detect it and directly downloaded playlists will store themselves there.
You can’t turn this off or change this setting, which is beneficial to being able to listen to music when you aren’t connected to WiFi or another active Internet connection. Spotify allows you to download a maximum of 3,333 songs to a mobile device. That’s about 16GB of music if you use Normal Quality (~160 kbps) and 32 GB of music using High Quality (~96 kbps) settings.
Lower quality vs. higher quality
In Spotify’s settings on your phone or tablet, you can change the quality of music you stream and download. This can save a bit of storage space on your device if necessary. The quality on Spotify, even on the low range, isn’t horrible to listen to, but if you’re a music aficionado, it may be subtle enough to ruin the experience.
You can utilize three quality settings in mobile Spotify: Normal, High and Extreme. Normal is your lowest setting, whereas the differences between High and Extreme are debatable.
Creating playlists based on what you listen to on the go
If you are using a small SD card or not using one at all, creating playlists for mobile purposes is the way to go. You can do this in Spotify on your computer or on your mobile device, by creating a new Playlist and name it something like Mobile.
Only place songs in the Playlist that you listen to frequently and that you want to download. This can be an effective way to manage limited storage space on your phone. You can also use this playlist as a way to download a song, delete it when you’re bored of it and add to it when you see fit. This lets you take the music you want with you on the go. The only downfall to creating playlists this way is that you have to manually remove songs once you “delete” them from Spotify. You can’t just Clear Data or Clear Cache to remove them from your SD card. However, this is a small price to pay to conserve space on your phone or tablet.
Conclusion
It should be noted that while some users may want to go offline with mobile Spotify, the app itself was designed to work well with 3G and 4G networks. This gives users a higher quality streaming experience than previously available on most mobile phones and networks. Depending on your phone and provider, if you find that the tips above aren’t cutting it, try out Spotify’s streaming power and see for yourself just how it works. If you have additional tips not mentioned here, please let us know in the comments below. Image credit: Spotify
