Here's how to move your music from OneDrive to Spotify

Microsoft announced yesterday that the company is killing its music streaming service Groove Music Pass. The company is partnering up with Spotify to let users transfer their music from Groove Music to Spotify, which will let you transfer (almost) all of your music and playlists from Groove to Spotify. But if you have used Groove Music to stream music from OneDrive, you’ll probably be disappointed to know that Spotify doesn’t offer any similar functionality that lets you upload your own music and store it in the cloud. The music streaming service doesn’t have any built-in function for this purpose, and it also doesn’t let you connect third-party cloud storage services for this.

But there’s a small trick that you can use to move your music from OneDrive to Spotify. It’s pretty straightforward, but you will still need to store your music on OneDrive or locally on your computer. Here’s how to do it:

1. Open Spotify, and go to Settings (using the drop-down near the profile picture)
2. Scroll down, look for the “Local Files” section and click the “Add A Source” button
3. From the folder selector dialog, find the Music folder (or wherever your music is stored), and hit OK. This will add all of your music stored on OneDrive as local files to Spotify. You might also want to remove all the other folders as they might have random files that you don’t want to sync
4. Now create a playlist called “Offline” or just type in a random name, add an image for the playlist if you want, and hit the “Create” button
5. Open up “Local Files” from the Your Library section on Spotify. Hit “Ctrl+A” to select all of the music from your Local Files, right-click, and click on Add To Playlist
6. From there, select the playlist you just created. Spotify will then automatically all the Local Files to the Offline folder

Now, this is all very obvious and kind of pointless if you can’t stream these files from your phone. But Spotify has a neat feature which lets you download all the music in a playlist on your phone for offline playback, even if they are locally stored on your computer. Here’s how:

1. Open Spotify on your Android/iOS device
2. Go to Your Library > Playlists
3. Find the playlist you created on the first step and open it
4. Look for the “Downloaded” label and click on the toggle beside it
5. Spotify will then automatically start downloading the files to your phone, and you can then listen to them when you are on the go

This should really help if you have lots of music stored on OneDrive that’s probably not available in Spotify’s catalog. The app doesn’t support FLAC like Groove Music, which is a bit of a disappointment if you like to listen to really high-quality music. But Spotify is still much better than Groove Music in many different ways, so have a look around the app and you’ll find some really nice features.

“Goodbye” artwork by Michael Gillette.