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Lag, Slow, Won't Load, Massive Delay, Program Latency, Laggy

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Lag, Slow, Won't Load, Massive Delay, Program Latency, Laggy

 

Spotify still has a pestering lag issue that some users still suffer across multiple platforms and it won't go away, nothing in the forums seems to help

Basically even something as simple as adjusting the volume slider on the program can take forever to come into effect.

 

Nearly everything about the software can be unbaringly slow despite having decent enough internet connections and a more than capable pcs. I know mine certainly is

I myself and many others have tried the whole cache reinstall turn off hardware acceleration and what not rubbish which did work for a while but now none of it works anymore since another update, this just keeps going on and on.

 

I'm mostly refering to these threads and all the other people who have complained over the years about this issue. The posts eventually all get archived and the problem doesn't get solved even if a mods own answer is tagged as a solution.



https://community.spotify.com/t5/Desktop-Mac/Horrible-lag-issue-with-new-update/td-p/1039828

 

https://community.spotify.com/t5/Android/New-Spotify-UI-very-slow-responsiveness/td-p/4770589

https://community.spotify.com/t5/Desktop-Windows/Spotify-Desktop-Client-is-extremely-laggy/td-p/4668...


https://community.spotify.com/t5/Desktop-Windows/Why-is-my-spotify-often-so-slow/td-p/703153

https://community.spotify.com/t5/Desktop-Windows/Why-is-my-spotify-often-so-slow/td-p/703153

https://community.spotify.com/t5/Desktop-Windows/Spotify-User-Interface-Lag-Desktop-Win-10-64-Softwa...

Posts from a few years ago about the same issue

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@Hopnut 

Regular
 2014-03-12 09:08 AM

"Same here.

I am so, so, so tired of this application.  I have reached the stage now of just rarely using it, as it is just so frustrating to navigate....When it first started it was so slick and simple in it's design and operation... But now it is just overloaded with **bleep** I don't want, and performance just suffers......Unless Spotify resolve these usability issues permanently, or produce a lite version with none of the add on **bleep**, I shall be cancelling my subscription.  I pay a lot for this but am not using it, because it is so very poor."


He seems to think the program is now overloaded, who knows, I wonder if he's still an active user?

"I too have used for years and now it's so slow as to be **bleep**ed. Looking at all my options at this point. Tired of paying for no new features and worse service. Used Pandora recenly and it's improved. I'll probably give them my money instead of several minute loading time for spotify."

 

----------------
@wolund

 
Casual Listener
 

"Is anyone from spotify team looking in to this? I'm also a paying subsciber and i too will leave if it persist to be so slow as this.

  

I use spotify on multiple devices from a desctop pc to an iphone and its same slow on all, also my friends who use spotify complain about the same issue.

 

From my point of view the Issue seems to be clearly on your side and no one seem to be caring.

what is being done to rectify? "

------------------
@billradovich 
Music Fan 
2015-08-27 09:53 AM
"i love spotify very much. but it's bizarre to me that the mobile app works a lot better than the desktop. about once a day when i open it, it is very very slow to load."

-----------------
@tomjez   

 
Regular
"Absolutely inusable for a few days. Minutes to get to "listened to recently" and be able to search whatever. Never saw an app do that. Or a software. Ridiculous."

-------------------
@MrCircuit 

 Music Fan 
 ‎2016-02-13 05:53 PM

"It kills me that this is listed as a solution. Because while it does help for a little bit, Spotify goes right back to being slow soon after. This is a workaround, not a solution. It's pretty amazing all these topics have been around for so long without even so much as a peep from a Spotify developer.

I really want to like Spotify. But I've since moved on to another service because I don't want to give them my $10/month or contribute to their ad revenue in any way until this is addressed. But seeing as how it hasn't even improved a bit, I'm not hopeful.

 

Also, you know what's a good music streaming app? Literally every other one I've tried. Okay, iTunes is iTunes, but that's been garbage since it came out."

^ This guys having the same issue as me 2 years ago.

"Hey Spotify,

 

WHAT ARE YOU DOING ABOUT THIS ISSUE??

 

Paying Premium is starting to be a waste of money. The desktop app is annoying and UNUSABLE.

 

If what we want is JUST BEING ABLE TO LISTEN the music we want, SPOTIFY IS NOT DELIVERING."

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@oddopolis 

Newbie
2017-03-29 07:45 PM

"Yeah, none of those tips work. Horrible desktop experience"


I'm going to skip all the years and get up to the more recent stuff because of post character count but I will add more and even make more posts eventually too, may as well.

"Same here. It's been an absolute catasthrophe the last year. It is and should be embarrasing for Spotify how poorly their product works after this company just turned 10 years.  

 

Spotify desktop is barely usable on my MacBook to the point that it's unacceptable. I've had spotify for 10 years and it's inconceivable that it's getting worse with time when you would reasonably expect it to be improving. I'm at this point where it's barely usable. 

 

I've done everything that is suggested in these forums. I've restarted the application. I've reinstalled. I've cleared the cache. I've turned off local files. I've turned off machine acceleration. Clearing the cache used to make it better for a while but I've cleared the cache and reinstalled the application once every single day for a week with no improvement whatsoever. I can't browse at all and have to go through spotify web player in order to do so. I haven't been able to use the browse section without several minutes lag for a long time so I've gotten used to it but that does not make it acceptable.....

Like I said, I've been a customer for 10 years. I want to be able to love Spotify as I've done for many years, but it's becoming extremely difficult to do so when the application isn't just running slow, but its most basic functions don't work"

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@no_username1

"The windows 10 spotify client. I've been using it for several months now, on both free and premium plans, and the app consistantly sucks. Scrolling is laggy, typed letters take a second or so to show on screen, resizing takes forever. It feels like every single task you want to accomplish is painful and laggy. I just discovered the spotify web player right now and realised that it's silky smooth. So how the **bleep** does a desktop app, where you would expect desktop performance, runs so much worse than a web version? Is there any fix for the performance of the desktop app?

 

Also my computer is a surface pro 2".

Same issues again and again, its not peoples computers.

--------------------------

@Riverbank_Hank 
 Music Fan
 

"@Meredith the fact that this thread is so old but still getting comments would indicate that the problems have existed for years and never been addressed by Spotify. Doing all of those additional steps (uninstall/reinstall, deleting folders/clearing cache, etc) is all Spotify ever comes back with, and not only is it a huge pita, the problem will just come back again eventually. That said, I think the key in your comment is this bit "a supported device that has at least 250MB available memory." It seems that your apps have become resource hogs, and so us folk with older devices are getting horrible lag. The only device that seems to play without lag is my Echo Dot, which of course has no graphic UI. "

How does this continue to go on let alone be a problem in the first place on standard installations.
If the app can't allow for such large libraries but has memory or resource issues in its own architecture why hasn't this been updated yet?

Reply

Accepted Solutions
Marked as solution

Tidal is the way to go everyone if you're having this issue, wish I had known about it earlier.

Its funny because it looks to be developed on the same platform as spotify it even looks very similar, tidal must have got it right though, it works flawlessly with no latency and it could even merge virtually all my libraries and playlists from spotify (except for a few no name songs) . Haha!

I'm happy and back to listening to music regularly at home on my hifi now 🙂

View solution in original post

12 Replies

I had a lot lot more examples from other posters but maxed out the character count in my first post but I will add more here too once I have the time and even make more posts about this.

same problem here, seems to be if I use another device or don't shut down. only seems to be the desktop, very frustrating

I'm getting increasingly frustrated. One piece of advice was to delete your entire library. What's the point of having playlists if you can't have a library? It takes up to a minute to load my podcasts and I'm ready to switch because of it.

Consider using the web player in Chrome.  It's responsive and does not seem to lag.  The desktop app is just too frustrating and unenjoyable to use.

Same for me , maybe one day an Developer will have an look over our problem an could fix it....

After a recent update (of spotify) I now have a very laggy program. I am sure it used to work properly before but this lag has me super annoyed. I was thinking of ditching Spotify for Deezer... but their Windows app sucks worse than this. Why are all the music streaming services so awful!

So I'd just to start off by saying that I've Spotify for the longest time now. However back around February, I started to notice that it had just suddenly gotten so unusable. Took a while to load up, playlists took longer to load, Pressing play a song wouldn't play the dam song for about 10 seconds and even then it woulndt update that it was playing for another 20. pausing the song took ages as it would rarely ever do it and don't even get me started on how long it took to swap songs. It was so bad that I basically just dropped Spotify completely. Nothing worked and it sucked. Recently I started to want to start using it again as I was getting tired of YouTube so I started to do all the steps again to supposedly try and fix it. At one post it talked about Avast and adding it as an exception, doing that did absolutely nothing. However, it did spark in my mind to do it for the other program I had. AdGaurd. I've used AdGaurd for the longest time because it's so good. I turned off AdGaurd and to my surprise, Spotify actually ******* worked. It was back to that click play on a song and it plays within half a second, click skip and it changes to the next song instantly. It's nice when it works like it's supposed to.

My main point here is that if you have AdGaurd and are experiencing these problems with Spotify then disable AdGaurd and see if it works. If you don't have AdGaurd or it doesn't work then I'm sorry for wasting your time. I just know it helped me and my friends after months.

 


@Tvignapiano wrote:

Consider using the web player in Chrome.  It's responsive and does not seem to lag.  The desktop app is just too frustrating and unenjoyable to use.


No dice. I'm here because I'm looking for a solution to lag in the Chrome web player. I know I have the bandwidth to stream constant audio, because YouTube doesn't lag with 1080p *video* when I'm multitasking, but it seems like just a few other tabs are enough to slow Spotify's web player down a whole lot. Seems like this issue is truly cross-platform.

Marked as solution

Tidal is the way to go everyone if you're having this issue, wish I had known about it earlier.

Its funny because it looks to be developed on the same platform as spotify it even looks very similar, tidal must have got it right though, it works flawlessly with no latency and it could even merge virtually all my libraries and playlists from spotify (except for a few no name songs) . Haha!

I'm happy and back to listening to music regularly at home on my hifi now 🙂

I just found the answer out of blue! (at least for me)

I found out that it has to do with Spotify's inability to push notifications. Spotify really wants to let the system know what is playing and thus waiting for the notification manager/daemon to return a success response. If there is nobody (= no notification manager) listening, Spotify is waiting for the notify action to time out. Also, it doesn't want to let other actions pile up in the queue and have all the notifications show at random. Just turn off notifications on new track or configure your notifications manager the right way.

Holy Moly, this may be the real solution! Just turned off the Push Notifications from within the Spotify App and now when I go to "Your Library" my lists are immediately pulling up (No delay for 30sec to 2 min of the app thinking). Just made the change so will continue to monitor & report back in a couple days.

@Stedmana - This is not a solution & it appears that @michaljanocko posted the real solution in June 2020. Please don't flag this as a solution.

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