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Error Code auth:16 on Mac after logging out. Clean reinstall does nothing

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Error Code auth:16 on Mac after logging out. Clean reinstall does nothing

Plan: Premium

USA

 

Device

Macbook Pro 2022

MacOS Monterrey 12.4

 

Traveled out of town to attend friends wedding. Signed out and signed in as friend's account since she had playlists set up for the reception. Testing at hotel went great. Downloaded a bunch of songs because we intended to not have internet access at venue. When launching app at venue it had logged us out and we got the dreaded auth:16 error code.

 

Back at hotel I tried doing the clean re-install and I still get the error message. There is nothing in my hosts file, no anti-virus or custom firewall software. I know it is not the internet here at the hotel because I was able to sign out / sign in on Sunday before we left to go to the venue. I can sign in and play music just fine in the browser. 

 

Can somebody give me some real help? I have read all the other threads and they all seem to "resolve" when doing the clean reinstall, so maybe there are some hidden/cached files I missed that are still causing issues? I cleared out the com.spotify folders in the app cache, but maybe there are others? I had songs downloaded both on my account and on my friends, so maybe that might be an issue?

 

 

Reply

Accepted Solutions
Marked as solution

Ok, after doing an even more thorough web search I managed to find more details on all of the cached files on Mac:

~Library/Application Support/Spotify
~Library/Saved Application State/com.spotify.client.savedState
~Library/Caches/com.spotify.installer
~Library/Caches/com.spotify.client
~Library/Preferences/com.spotify.client.plist
~Library/Preferences/com.spotify.helper.plist
~Library/LaunchAgents/com.spotify.webhelper.plist

 

Removing those did the trick, and the clean reinstall finally worked! Of particular note is the Saved Application Support folders which contain a users sub-folder. Looking at that before I deleted I saw folders for both me and the other user, so I am guessing that those were the causes of the issue.

 

I am a little frustrated that I had to spend literally hours of searching and trial-and-error before finding a solution on a content-marketing website. Perhaps Spotify can update their official documentation to make it more clear what folders need to be removed in order to do a completely "clean" reinstall?

 

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3 Replies

By the way, I have tried to contact support from https://support.spotify.com/us/contact-spotify-support/ but when I tap the "start messaging" button, it says "connection not available".

Marked as solution

Ok, after doing an even more thorough web search I managed to find more details on all of the cached files on Mac:

~Library/Application Support/Spotify
~Library/Saved Application State/com.spotify.client.savedState
~Library/Caches/com.spotify.installer
~Library/Caches/com.spotify.client
~Library/Preferences/com.spotify.client.plist
~Library/Preferences/com.spotify.helper.plist
~Library/LaunchAgents/com.spotify.webhelper.plist

 

Removing those did the trick, and the clean reinstall finally worked! Of particular note is the Saved Application Support folders which contain a users sub-folder. Looking at that before I deleted I saw folders for both me and the other user, so I am guessing that those were the causes of the issue.

 

I am a little frustrated that I had to spend literally hours of searching and trial-and-error before finding a solution on a content-marketing website. Perhaps Spotify can update their official documentation to make it more clear what folders need to be removed in order to do a completely "clean" reinstall?

 

Have you tried disabling the offline mode on your Spotify account?

 

I had the same issue before and  it could be because of your Spotify account. Before logging in to a different account, you should turn-off the offline mode first.

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