Sound keeps briefly dropping out

[MarkusLaker]

Plan: Premium Duo

Country: UK

OS: Android 16

Device: Google Pixel Tablet

I'm trying to use Max Richter's "Sleep" album as a sleep aid, but the sound keeps glitching and it has the opposite effect.  There are two problems:

1. Gapless playback doesn't always work, and the audio sometimes cuts out momentarily between tracks
2. More seriously, the audio sometimes cuts out for about 300ms in the middle of a track

Things I've tried, none of which has worked:

1. Clean reinstall
2. Download the music to avoid connectivity problems
3. Disable Wi-Fi to reduce background work done by the tablet
4. Listen on battery power or mains power
5. Turn the screen on or off
6. Check that EQ is disabled in case CPU is overloaded
7. Drop sound quality from Very High to Normal (then clear saved data and download again) to reduce system demands
8. Disable volume normalisation, likewise
9. Allow battery background usage in Android system settings
10. Disable data-saver
11. Check (by replaying sections) that glitches are not on the original recording
12. Check that other apps (e.g. YouTube in Firefox) can produce sound without glitching, so the problem is specific to Spotify
13. Try listening via the Spotify Web site in Firefox.  Guess what: that glitches worse than the app.

I've given this a good shot.  I'm out of ideas.  What's the answer?

[MarkusLaker]

I tried four more things that didn't work:

1. I uninstalled the Wavelet app in case it was adding latency or CPU load.
2. I disabled spatial stereo, likewise.
3. In Android's developer settings, I disabled child process restrictions.  (When this didn't help, I changed the setting back.)
4. I rebooted the tablet.

I should say explicitly that I'm using the tablet's built-in speakers rather than a connected device.

I listened to the same music using the Linux desktop app and a pair of headphones, and it was flawless.  Kudos to Spotify for supporting Linux!  Unfortunately, my PC is on the wrong floor to serve as a sleep aid and it has no speakers.

[MihailY]

Hey @MarkusLaker,

Thanks for reaching out and kudos for the troubleshooting you've already done.

To investigate this further, can you check if you get the issue with any other album from the catalogue or when you add this specific one to a playlist? Also, is it possible to log into a different account on the tablet and test again? 

This will help us determine if it's an account-, device- or content-related issue.

Keep us posted.

[MarkusLaker]

Thanks, Mihali.  I appreciate your coming back to me.

I played Pink Floyd's Wish You Were Here on the tablet, and it glitched in under three minutes.

Next, I created a new "Test" playlist and added the Richter music to it.  I then played the playlist.  It glitched within five minutes.

I tried to create a throwaway Spotify account using a spare email address, but challenge.spotify.com kept saying "Something went wrong, try again later," so I wasn't able to get any further with that.  Is it likely that signing on under a different ID would solve an audio glitch?

Thanks again.

[MihailY]

Hey @MarkusLaker,

Thanks for your reply.

If there's no easy way to check with a different account, we can skip that step since it's indeed unlikely that this is the cause of the issue.

Since you've already exhausted all relevant troubleshooting, I'll go ahead and note your report, however, I can't give an ETA on when it will be addressed. In the meantime, just make sure to keep your app up to date.

We're here if there's anything else.

Cheers,