Spotify is agonisingly slow on desktop (windows 11)

[Yasmin14]

Windows 11

I've never had issues with spotify until recently, not even on Windows 11.

Recently I pulled all my liked songs into a playlist, and also added my local songs to the playlist. After a lot of troubleshooting to get my local songs to work, things were fine for a while.

Very quickly however, the desktop app began to become unusable. I would search in the playlist, and the search would take minutes to show up, IF it showed up at all. I would remove the search, and it would take equally as long to return to showing the full playlist, if it did at all. I'd hit play/pause, on the current song or a new song, or I'd hit the next/back button, and it would take ages to respond. I'd hit space to pause, and it'd still think I'm in the search bar and start matching with songs with spaces in them, even though the search bar was no longer clicked into.

When it took ages to respond I would close it to reopen it, which would result in spotify closing but not quitting properly because the app was hanging, requiring a force quit every single time.

I cleared the cache over and over and over, through the app and manually, and it only ever made a marginal difference in speed, while the other bugs (hanging and requiring force quits frequently, the search bug) remained. Restarts of the application or the device made no difference, this slowness was progressive and lingered no matter what.

Reinstalling was the one thing that made the biggest difference. It remained marginally slow at times but it was far more responsive in general and felt usable again. Unfortunately it's been about 3 weeks since my reinstall and it is once again slowing down in the exact same way, getting progressively worse. It is once again taking ages to respond to searches, play/pause/next/back button presses, or remove songs from playlists/liked songs. Reinstalling every time the appliance becomes slow is not a feasible option, especially given it slowed down after only about 3 weeks.

I have no problems on mobile, only desktop. If there's something I haven't tried I'm all ears because this seems like the application is coded in some fundamentally flawed way.

[chakibchemso]

this app has officially became garbage. old framework and poor code and no optimization whatsoever. for the amount of the money they have and given the relatively simple app this must be rebuilt. with a decent cross platform framework or even using native toolkits. they can afford that. end rant. thx.

[chakibchemso]

this is insane! 12th gen i5

[MatteoBomba50]

Plan

Premium

Country

Italy

Device

Desktop

Operating System

Windows 11

My Question or Issue

I've been getting low frame rates with the Spotify App when focusing on the App (I know it's a minor inconvenience but I do notice it when I switch between windows). I have tried doing a clean uninstall, but nothing has changed. I have an AMD Radeon RX6700XT installed on my pc.

[Herbmeiser]

Just a note if someone else has the same issue. So I tried to install Spotify from Microsoft Store but it lagged very hard on the home screen, scrolling just throttled my cpu and overall experience is very slow and unresponsive to use.

After that I downloaded it directly from Spotify.com and it's completely smooth.. The executable is different on the two versions as well. A bit weird so I would like to know what is the cause for that or has anyone had the same issue? I tried the same with Discord and it worked fine through both ways. For some reason Spotify is so much worse performance when downloaded from MS Store.

[#6]

I have been having this problem for over a month.
spotify sometimes lags.
What kind of lag is that there is a delay when playing a song, if you touch the volume bar, it is reflected about 5 seconds later, and there is the same delay when specifying the number of seconds in a song
I have tried every clean install and downgrade of spotify and it has not resolved the issue.
Specs are 13700kf, 3070ti, 32gb memory 1tb ssd.

[e-clect-eddy]

Spotify is slow since the last 2 updates for the desktop app on W10. It's as if the hardware acceleration is no longer working. If tried troubleshooting this with online suggestions but nothing made any difference. Spotify is just behaving very odd, MS Store starts (as a background process) whenever I start Spotify. Plus every few hours it auto-starts SpotifyWidgetProvider.exe which is not supported by Microsoft on W10, and I can't shut it off. I've tried every setting and it should not auto-start but it does.

[e-clect-eddy]

Today another update was pushed via MS Store, but none of the past 3 updates made any improvement. I've emptied cache countless times and ditto for switching Hardware acceleration on/off in settings. No effect. In APP settings in Windows 10 Home I did get a minor bug solved with the REPAIR option but the annoying overall sluggish navigation remains (maybe since the February 2025 Windows update) or around that time. Cause Spotify had an update as well a day later.

I do have an extended library, with more than 125 playlists, some have +4.000 songs. And +1,25Gb of cache for just Spotify in my Windows profile (say TreeSizeFree) but none of that cache can be cleaned (if that is the cause) > I suspect that will only be cleared once I uninstall the app completely? I have a old 3rd gen Intel process with 8Gb memory but until February that was not a problem, navigation was fine.

At first years ago I had the standalone / normal program on my PC but than was encourage (or switched over) to use the MS Store version. That one seems more buggy and has less options to toggle when troubleshooting.

PS will the MS Store version still get updates after Microsoft terminates support for W10? and the standalone version of Spotify?