Premium account - tracks with distortion

[Morphevz]

Dear Spotify Developers, Staff & Money makers,

Recently I started noticing distortion in some of the tracks I listen to. This is extremely inconvenient and something I could expect when using a free account, but not when paying for a service at a premium price of 10 Euros a month.

The motto "If it's not broken, don't fix it" comes to mind when Spotify was working fine and dandy in the past. Now all I see is the music service provided going downhill while focussing on all media perk hype that I couldn't care less for while paying to listen to music.

Can you please provide an ETA for the sound distortion fix? I'm far from interested in giving the Spotify company 10 euros a month to be provided with distorted sound tracks.

Thank you kindly,

A soon to be ex-customer

[Richard]

Hey Morphevz, welcome to the Community.

Is this the case in all tracks, or just some? And the same ones each time? If so, let me know and I'll investigate if this is a content issue.

In the meantime, you could try changing the Hardware Acceleration setting in your Preferences (edit > Preferences) as this has been known to cause issues during playback.

[slb]

I am a new (1 week) premium user in Alabama, USA. Not sure when it started but today all tracks I've tested on my Dell XP PC sound HORRIBLE (static and crackling). I have tried high(???) quality streaming and offline. I have tried hardware acceleration on and off. These changes make no difference; quality still very poor in all instances. Interestingly, my iphone 4 sounds pretty good on streaming (extreme) or offline.(high quality coz I can't get the extreme setting to stick!!!). Although last night in my car stereo with iphone plugged in, songs sounded very garbled and distorted.

I just recommended spotify to a friend. I will tell her to hold off until this POOR quality issue gets fixed. I was so excited about spotify. 

thanks in advance for your efforts to fix this quality issue

[Richard]

Hey slb, welcome to the Community.

So the distortion is mostly on your desktop then? Is all other playback in other players ok? I would recommend updating all your sound card drivers, etc. as something to try.

[Morphevz]

Hi Richard,

The distortion happens "on and off" and is not noticed in all tracks.

I've tried the following options enabled and disabled to no effect:

- Set the same  volume level for all tracks

- Enable hardware acceleration

- High quality streaming (right...)

Additionally, I've made the playlists available offline to see if the streaming was the problem, but no... Happens to offline tracks as well.

I haven't been noting down the affected tracks, but I'll try to keep this in mind in the future.

I don't recall this happening at work, though I'm not paying that much attention to the music playing while working.

I'm running Spotify at work on a Windows 7 32-bit machine with onboard sound card with most likely outdated drivers, using headphones or a 2.1 system.

At home - where the problem seems more visible - I'm running Windows 7 64-bit with a Creative Sound Blaster X-Fi card in a 5.1 system.

[Richard]

How's the playback more generally on those machines? Upgrading the sound card drivers would be a safe bet in my opinion - and a good thing to do in any case.

[Morphevz]

My home PC has its drivers always updated - I'm a PC enthusiast and that's part of having the machine always fine tuned.

I don't have other sound problems in either of the machines, at work or at home.

Instead of troubleshooting my PC - when others are suffering from the same issue; it might be a better idea to escalate this real and serious issue to someone who knows what changed in the Spotify service in the last 6 months that could have affected its sound quality.

Edit:  is one of the affected tracks - however, the problem is not present at the moment. As I mentioned earlier, this is an "on and off issue", so... 19:45 CET, 29.02.2012 - issue not present.

Edit 2:  - just like Raindrops, this is another of the affected tracks that played just fine at 20:05 CET, 29.02.2012...

[Richard]

I just gave those tracks a go and they seemed to work, so I'm not sure if this is a content issue. We'll keep looking into it though.

A few further things I'd like to ask though: after this happens with a track once does it happen again? You say it's an on-and-off issue and I'm wondering whether it comes back after going away.

Also, does this only happen during certain time periods during the day? If we could narrow those down that would be helpful too. Thanks!

[user-removed]

Hello, I'm getting this distortion, I have unlimited. It happens occasionally sounds horrendous, but when I change track it's fine, I go back to the original, and it's ok. If you want time of day it happened five minutes ago.

[user-removed]

Just happened again.

[Morphevz]

Hi Richard,

I can surely narrow down the time period for you.

This is mainly noticeable - but not exclusive - in night periods for CET hours; let's say between 8pm and 3am.

I'm on a wired and very stable 30Mb connection with all bandwidth allocated to Spotify. However and as I stated earlier, I made my favourite playlists available offline to get rid of the problem, but that didn't help.

Additionally, but unfortunately not very helpful, I can confirm that the following scenarios can and have happened:

A) Current track has distortion, skipping to the next track still has distortion, going back to previous track still has distortion

B) Current track has distortion, skipping to the next track has no distortion, going back to previous track still has distortion

PC details:

OS: Windows 7 Professional 64-bit (with SP1) - retail and fully updated

RAM: 6Gb DDR3

CPU: Intel Core i7 920

Sound Card: Sound Blaster X-Fi Titanium

Sound Output: Optical

Encoder: DTS

Sound Format: 24 bit, 48000 Hz

Sound Drivers: 2.17.0008 (latest, dated from 26 Jul 2010)

[Richard]

Ok, I've been chatting with our team and we've come up with two ideas.

1) Are you using the "set the same volume level for all tracks" option in your Preferences? This could be causing an issue. Try turning it off.

2) The sound format you've mentioned might be relevant too. Try a frequency of 44100 Hz instead, if you can.

Hopefully one of these (or the combination of both) should put things right.

[Morphevz]

Hi Richard,

Many thanks for your reply.

Regarding your questions:

1) I can assure you that option is always off with me.

2) Thanks for the suggestion; I'll try it out next time it happens! Although I'd rather try 96000 Hz instead of 44100 Hz. 😉

Have a nice weekend!

[Sinenomine]

This has also been happening to me.  Most notably today, 9/9/12.  It's happening on ALL tracks.  This on my Windows 7 PC, it never happens on my Iphone, yet I do have a host of other probelms that Spotify seriously needs to work on.  It's a constant and persistent buzz and crackles sound.  I've listened to:  Major Lazer (not all songs had as bad as others), Mika's new song 'Celebrate', through out the song, a song that was recommended as 'new' on Spotify (really, come on guys, if you feature it, it should work right). And now Cat Power's new album SUN.  1st song, crackling constantly. And now also on the 2nd song.... it's been 5 songs and still doing it. This isn't my audio card as it's new (6 mo) and it doesnt happen with ANY other music or video.  And it's not my internet.  I'm beginning to think it's buffering, and Spotify isn't taking credit for that end of the issue.  VERY frustrating to read the mod/ answerer of this thread pointing the finger back at the user.  PLEASE look into this issue, it makes a Premuim account not worth paying for.  I can't stand listening to beautiful music with horrible GRRRR's  and Bleeeurrpppss!!!  

(YES I tried ALL the solutions on here with NO improvement)

[David]

On your Windows machine, try going to the following - Control Panel > Sound > Manage Audio Devices > Properties for your default sound device > Enhancements

In this screen, try turning off any audio enhancements that might have been turned on.

[Sinenomine]

Checked that, and I had no audio enhancements turned on.  No boxes were checked.  Still getting crackling.

[Sinenomine]

We uninstalled the application on my PC and it's played two songs without crackles.  (it had been continuing the issue just before doing this).  We made sure everything on this PC is up to date and by deleting and reinstalling Spotify it also made sure we had everything up to date on that as well.  It's been working, but will provide an update if that fails as well.  Hope this input helps others!

[marcopoloz]

Hi there, been using spotify a lot more recently and have noticed, digital distortion track sounds on random track in online and offline mode. to Remedy it I usually stop start the track, and the it's gone. But when a new track starts playing about 2/10 will start with a digital distortion sound on the track until I stop start again. I'm using it on a newly install xp sysyem with up to date drivers.

The digital distortion sounds like it's ben resampled at Lower Bit  like 4-bit samples. Unlike a CD which is 16bit I beleive.

Disapointed since I'm also a paying member

[walterbee]

hi, i see some time has elapsed since the last post here. i have this problem on a new win7 64bit pc with state of the art hardware and up to date drivers. i've attemted everything suggested in these threads, and i still have heavy compression artifacts; staticy, almost like AM radio (anyone even remember that?). any update on a resolution to this?

i have a large collection of music on a network server, and i use itunes and mog with no issues, so i've narrowed the problem to spotify. hope this can be corrected, i otherwise enjoy the service.

[Pepepaco · Accepted solution]

I had the same issue; the following seems to help improve the audio quality in win7 x64:

1. Open Playback devices.

2. Open the default device Properties.

3. Go to the third tab [Effects] and check disable system Effects.

4. Optionally go to fourth tab [Advanced] and change the audio quality at your own preference.

Regards.