Slack is distorting Spotify Sound

[kramttocs]

Frequently throughout the day, Spotify sound will distort and get quiet. The songs are random but once it does it to a song, it's consistent at the same place even if I go back to that time or relisten later. So I assume it corrupts the cache but that doesn't really make sense either.
I've narrowed this down to Slack. If I have a song that's distorted at, let's say 1:05, I can replay that over and over and it's always distorted. If I kill Slack, the sound is immediately fixed.

[Ivelina]

Hey @kramttocs,

Thanks for posting in the Community!

If you haven't already you can start with giving both apps a clean reinstall which can help resolve different issues with their performance. For Spotify you can follow the steps here. 

What device is this happening on and have you tried on a different one? Something else you can also do is turning off the notification sounds in Slack to see if that changes anything.

Let us know how it goes and we'll see what we can suggest next 🙂

[kramttocs]

Thanks Ivelina. Will try that. While I am confident it's related to Slack, it's very inconsistent and seemingly impossible to predict.

(having a survey request popup in the middle of me typing a reply here is pretty frustrating...)

[kramttocs]

I am still testing things out and the connection with Slack is still behaving like I mentioned earlier but it may also be due to using a usb c dock on my laptop, that having a usb connection to a kvm switch and the speakers 3.5mm jack plugged into the kvm. Possibly the usb connection can't handle it all. Testing with the speakers 3.5mm hooked directly to the dock.

[Elena]

Hey again @kramttocs,

We pondered over the possibilities and we came to the conclusion that this is a result of the app interacting with your particular tech environment. Usually we can help if the issue comes from Spotify, however since this cannot reliably be reproduced by us, we can only advise you on other things that may be the root cause of this issue.

The Community remains here to help as best we can, fingers crossed it all works out!

[kramttocs]

Thanks Elana. I agree that this appears related to my hardware setup. If I find anything to the contrary, I will report back.

[scarabues]

This happens to me as well. I think it's more an issue with Slack rather than with Spotify. I noticed that the broken sound appears only after I'm on huddle and it can be "fixed" by restarting Slack.

[kramttocs]

Glad to know it's not just me! Slack support was great to deal with but their suggestions didn't have an impact that I could see and very tough for them to help further, like Spotify, without the ability to recreate. So far by hooking my 3.5mm speaker jack to my dock, it hasn't happened. That's a pain though to switch between PCs unless I get a switch. One thing I did notice is that when going through USB audio (how it shows when the 3m5mm is plugged into the kvm) I can't change the frequency/rate I think it is. I found some references online that said maxing it out helped. 

How are you setup? Have you tried doing that?