Spotify and the cloud

Peter Woodbridge
Friday 18 November 2016

We all love to listen to music, whether that be at work or at home. And for most people, Spotify is their go-to app for music streaming. Today, I would like to share with you a helpful tip so you can get the most out of your subscription.

As you may know, listening to your own ‘local’ music can be a pain using Spotify. This guide will show you how to set-up your own music to work perfectly with Spotify.

Spotify4 Spotify5

First of all, if you don’t already have one, you’re going to need a DropBox account (use that link to get an extra 500Mb of space). The Dropbox basic plan, which is free, comes with 2Gb of space. But the paid-for version comes with 1Tb (1,000GB) of space.

Once you have created your account, you will need to install the DropBox app. This program will run on your computer, constantly monitoring a specific folder. Any files added to or removed from that folder get synchronised with any other computer you’ve installed it on.

Next, you want to move your own music library into the newly created Dropbox folder. You can also organise the files and folders within your Dropbox folder anyway you like, i.e. by artist or genre. Now you want to set your Spotify to look for your local files. To do this, open Spotify and:

  • Hover over the ‘Edit’ tab at the top of the app and select ‘Preferences…’

Spotify1

  • Scroll to the bottom of the ‘Preferences’ page and you will find a ‘Local Files’ section.
  • Select the ‘Add a source’ button and then navigate to the location of your Dropbox folder.

Spotify2

Luckily, Spotify will automatically look for newly uploaded files. So you don’t have to worry about setting this up every time you use Spotify. Though you will have to follow these steps for every new computer that you set this up on.

Now that you’ve configured Spotify to look for any local files you have stored in Dropbox, whenever you upload a song on one computer, it will be synchronised to every computer you have connected. Making storing and listening to your own music much easier.

Related topics