Quality of Sound

[rickyws]

Spotify Username

rickyws

Plan

Free/Premium

Country

 Scotland

Device

Dell XPS 17

Operating System

Windows 7 Ultimate

My Question or Issue

Hi

I have used Spotify Premium for a while. I mostly use it at work using the the web player, and using this I have no sound issues. However at home where I use the desktop application the sound skipped and jumped continually. I tried everything suggested in the community but in vain. I keep my Dell in tip top condition and up to date.

I therefore came off the Premium service as paying money for something that wasnt working for me was pointless. 

Last night I opened up the Spotify application on my Dell at home (now on the free service) and the sound was perfect. So frustrating! Am I alone in finding this? Can anyone shed any light?

Thanks.

[Sebasty]

Hey @rickyws

Such audio issues have many different causes.

If you have very bad internet connection at home, that might cause this, but I'm sceptical about this. I've been able to use my Premium account with very bad connection - music played just fine, starting the song delayed a bit. Pictures didn't load though.

Common causes include:

1. Windows audio settings, such as enabled sound enhancements and the Communications setting.

2. Antivirus like Avast! scanning HTTP traffic and causing delays in audio streaming.

3. Something wrong with the audio driver so it needs reinstalling. (Recent Windows 10 update did this for some users.)
4. Something wrong with the Spotify installation, clean reinstall should fix this.

5. Using Bluetooth headphones/speakers may cause this issue too.

I don't really think upgrading to Premium would cause audio glitches, the root is likely somewhere else. The cause might be even unknowingly removed by you or Windows by now.

I personally also use Windows 7 and I'm on Premium. I used to have audio issues, but these were all-round audio dropouts. Happened everywhere. I had some huge latency issues and I managed to fix it by upgrading my hard drive to SSD.
I hope you don't have that issue. 🙂

Let me know if you have more questions!

[rickyws]

Thanks for your thoughts. The only thing I havent investigated is upgrading
to SSD. I should also have said that I had no sound issues with any other
applications. Anyhow, time to think about SSDs.
Thanks, again.

[Sebasty]

@rickyws

While upgrading to SSD really fixed a lot of issues for me, I did it because my machine became so slow it clearly needed reinstallation. I just went further and reinstalled everything on a fresh SSD.

I measured latency using Latencymon (you can read about it here, if you wish to learn more about it).
It's possible to have some latency (even the kind where the program says it can cause issues), and actually hear no glitches at all. Audible glitches should also be present in any audio - playing some high quality audio with your media player and opening some heavier program at the same time will likely produce that. If you don't have any issues like that, it's probably not the cause...

(if that's indeed the cause, you can also try looking into getting more memory - constant writes/reads into paging file can cause audio glitches too.)

It's still strange that Spotify's audio was glitchy while everything else was perfectly fine.

You're welcome, I hope any of this helps you. 🙂