Crackling/Static when playing ANY song, ONLY on Windows.

[annoyed_]

This has been going on for months. I can't find any answers to this. EVERY song crackles and stutters.

No matter streaming or local, no matter what combination of "enable hardware acceleration" or "play high quality" or any other option frequently suggested is checked/unchecked, no matter how many programs I close out to just have Spotify playing, it's crackling and stuttering 70% of the time I'm trying to use the Windows version of Spotify on my PC. The app on my phone works perfectly, as does every other device I've EVER used. It's solely on my Windows laptop. In the Task Manager, there's two spotify programs. One is at ~93,000 K and the other ~76,000 K. CPU usage is about 30% max with just spotify streaming. 2.3GB Memory. Tried several sets of speakers. Same problem. ONLY on PC. I've seen this problem all over google. No one seems to know what to do and there's posts from 2012 with this issue...

What the hell is going on?

[omegaiori666]

i have the same problem on my nexus 6. thought it was a hearphones problem, but it tried two different ones and the crackling is still there

[etherist]

I have the same problem on my Nexus 6, have tried various settings, have reinstalled, nothing helps. . WTF? Cached or streaming, doesn't matter. I never use EQ.

[OldBeno]

I had this issue on Windows 10. I went into Show Advanced Settings and switched off the Enable Hardware acceleration..I have no idea what this does but I'm pretty sure my hardware can handle streaming music from Spotify..

Anyway my cracklings gone and hopefully this fixes it for others 🙂

[nefiwa]

after a long search i was able to solve the problem by disabling the 'microsoft virtual wifi  miniport adapter' (device manager/network adapters/ Microsoft Virtual wifi ...: right-click & choose 'disable')

[brianberlin]

After torturing myself searching these forums of fellow tortured voices out here, I found that exactly ZERO solutions resolved this. I tried all the switching sound settings up, turning off hardware acceleration, etc., and nope, nada, nothing worked.

Then, there was a lightsaber sound and I heard a voice say "... Use the browser, Luke ..." 

Yep, running it Chrome produces perfect sound, i.e. the problem is the way Spotify has implemented their client app. I would guess it's something to do with the way it utilizes CPU. No other apps have this issue. I still use the buggy client for everything but playback.