100% high CPU with fresh install on macOS Monterey with M1 Pro

[jeremy-tm]

Plan Premium

Country New Zealand

Device MacBook Pro (16-inch, 2021) M1 Pro

Spotify for macOS (Apple Silicon)
1.1.71.560.gc21c3367

My Question or Issue

About ~75 seconds after opening Spotify, CPU jumps from a normal 2-4% up to ~100% and stays there. See attached image. Spotify cannot be quit normally after this happens, and must be force-quit.

I've reported a similar issue in the past so I knew what to try. It was already a fresh install on a fresh copy of macOS with a brand new Macbook Pro so no point trying a fresh re-install. I tried with and without hardware acceleration, and I tried turning on and off all possible options (incl. advanced).

Nothing worked, CPU still starts cranking every time.

Let me know if there's anything I didn't think of, otherwise your engineers will need to look at this one.

[Ver]

Hey @jeremy-tm,

Thanks for posting here 🙂

We haven't seen any other reports on this and the recent feedback in our dedicated Apple Silicon Thread has been positive, so this is quite odd and could be an isolated case.

We'll continue keeping an eye for other reports.

In this case we'd recommend that you try running a clean reinstall with these steps to see if anything changes. It's important to make sure that the mentioned folders in the article are deleted. After that you can install the app from here.

Let us know how it goes.

[jeremy-tm]

Hi ver,

Same issue unfortunately. Here are videos of the reinstall, and CPU issue remaining:

- Before reboot: https://d.pr/v/JUB8Gj
- After reboot: https://d.pr/v/K4mcJM

Please let me know next steps.

[jeremy-tm]

Oops, didn't realise your link went to a beta version.

However I tried that too and the issue persists.

[Kiril]

Hi @jeremy-tm,

Thanks for your reply and this info!

We've tried to reporduce the situation on a macOS device, but without any success and so this might be connected to some additional factors in your specific setup. We noticed you are using also other apps that are using Spotify data in some capacity (for example Discord and maybe possible others). Were such apps also active when you've experienced this on your new MacBook? You could try quitting all other apps that might be connected to Spotify and see if this will make a difference for the CPU usage. 

It's also worthwhile restarting the Spotify app twice in a row. This may sound odd but it's how the app does a refresh and could clear possible cache-related issues.

Hope you find this useful. Keep us posted if you have any questions.

[jeremy-tm]

Sorry for the late response. I know how to reproduce the issue! There was a corrupt MP3 file in my Users/jeremy/Music directory that Spotify couldn't handle, causing it to consume 100% CPU when scanning local files.

Let me know if your engineers would like the file so they can reproduce and fix Spotify to handle this issue better in the future.

[Alex]

Hey @jeremy-tm,

Thanks for the reply and the info you've provided.

As we can't allow the sharing of links to such files on the forums, this is not an option. 

Can you let us know if the issue was resolved on your end when you deleted the file?

Cheers.

[jeremy-tm]

Hi Alex, I wouldn't consider the issue resolved until Spotify can scan local folders—regardless of the contents—and not fall into a state where system resources are overused. I'm confident your devs can reproduce the problem by creating their own corrupt mp3 file, and proceed to resolve the bug from there.