Limiting bandwidth

[JRRR]

Hi, I cannot use Spotify at work because my machine quickly generates a lot of traffic that annoys our local IT department. Spotify itself is not forbidden nor blocked but it draws attention easily which results in me to turn it off again. I have a really good connection (1Gbit/s Internet connection) and Spotify seems to like it as well. Is there any way for me to limit Spotify's hunger for bandwidth? BTW, I have a Spotify Unlimited membership. I would upgrade to Premium if this would solve the issue. But I have to cancel my subscription if I cannot use Spotify anymore. Regards JRRR

[Peter__]

Hey! Welcome to the community 🙂 

Annoyingly, there is no way built into Spotify to limit its bandwidth (no matter what subscription plan you are on), reducing your cache size in the Preferences menu sometimes reduces bandwidth but that is more like magic than an actual solution. 

Few things I can suggest:

- You can use a bandwidth shaping tool such as netlimiter or similar to manually limit Spotify's bandwidth on the desktop client. 

- You can use the web player, or web/desktop preview client which doesn't use p2p like normal Spotify (so no upload bandwidth usage). 

If you want to give the web player a go, try pointing your browser to play.spotify.com and see if you land on the web player (it is only available to the public in certain countries). It works best in chrome if you have it! Alternatively, you can download the web player bundled into a native windows application from this link (which should work anywhere I think) but be aware installing that version will overwrite your existing Spotify desktop installation. 

Peter

[JRRR]

Hi Peter, thank you for your quick reply! The webplayer is new to me. Thank you for pointing this one out! I will see how it goes but it sounds very promising 🙂 Regards

[JRRR · Accepted solution]

Just want to give some short feedback: Been using the player now for a couple of days and it is working perfectly! Thanks again for pointing this one out to me 🙂

[Peter__]

Glad to hear it! 🙂 

Peter

[user-removed]

That doesn't sound right. Surely decreasing the cache requires songs to be redownloaded more often.

[Peter__]

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@user-removed wrote:

That doesn't sound right. Surely decreasing the cache requires songs to be redownloaded more often.

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Yes but it reduces upload usage. Spotify is a p2p network on the desktop, so you client downloads and shares content with other clients. The larger your local cache, the more tracks you will be sharing with other clients. 

Peter

[user-removed · Accepted solution]

Listen underground music - it's a huge Bandwidth limit. So when only some people listening it, Spotify will use less P2P.

You know, all are asking for Lady Gaga, Rihanna, Calvin Harris crappy junk... But NO ONE know about Recca, DJ THT, DJ Remx, Adam Easter etc... Underground music - it's a best bandwidth limit!