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.

[strok_777]

It didn't work for me. It's unbelievable that the browser version works much faster than the desktop one... What a **bleep** of service

[DJ_Level_3]

I am having the same issue; I tried this and so far it's worked! If it slows down again I'll report back.

[DJ_Level_3]

It is definitely better still, but there's still massive spikes of lag as it tries to load the album covers or change settings. Seems mostly like the audio control runs on the same thread as loading album covers and Now Playing data, which is not good. Please fix this, Spotify.

[DJ_Level_3]

Even more telling is the fact that Offline Mode performs perfectly fine. I guess I'm only going online to load new songs onto my megaplaylist.

[Antharro]

Just wanted to +1 this. Running v1.2.45.454.gc16ec9f6 on Windows 10. i7 CPU, 32GB RAM, SSD.

Setting "No proxy" has helped a bit but I remain to be convinced that this is a permanent fix.

My understanding is that the current desktop "client" is really just the web version running in chromium embedded with some extra bits to tie in better with the desktop. I may be a little out of date here but this seems like an awful idea. Discord does the same and its performance can be utterly horrible at times. I appreciate this means development time is a lot lower and it allows the "app" to run on a wider range of OSes without extensive development, but the tradeoff in performance just isn't worth it. Just develop a proper desktop client in a something like C and compile it on each platform. It'll run a **bleep** of a lot better, and frankly, all the people who pay for this service using Premium/Family or even just listening to ads deserve better.

(Also bring back the option to synchronize mobile playlists from the desktop app. And stop making me click "Playlists" then "Custom" every time you decide to mess with the interface. Just seems that every "update" is one step forwards, two steps backwards. Unnecessary. Anyway, not relevant to this thread.)

[11166434845]

SPOTIFY Desktop App. for Windows 10 is almost Tragic !!

• It needs up to 15 minutes to load
• Crashes from time to time or freezes
• It can often not close (not responding) and closes only via Task Manager.

Please look at these issues and do something.

[reaper4578]

It's honestly embarrassing that this issue has gotten so bad. I have large playlists and lots of local files, yes, but those things were true a couple of years ago too, and the app actually worked back then. A well-built program should be able to handle those things, at least as far as it can utilize system resources, but Spotify seems incapable of that - the app only ever seems to use a single thread, even at it's laggiest, when service has slowed to a dead stop for minutes on end.

I would even be willing to use the web app in a browser if it really worked that much better, but it doesn't, and it's missing crucial features that the desktop and mobile app have!

I pay good money for a service I can barely use anymore, one that gets consistently worse with every update. This is no way to run a company, and it's no way to produce software.

[Schreckly]

Hello, I have tried numerous solutions and yet the issue persists, if I could have some guidance that would be great. Here are the solutions I have tried:

1 restarting my computer
2 switching wifi connection
3 clearing cache/temporary files
4 updating drivers and windows updates
5 uninstalling and reinstalling the application and making sure to remove all spotify related data

These are all the solutions and none have worked. I'm on a laptop windows 11. I am able to listen to music in the webplayer without issue but that is only a temporary solution and this issue has been happening for a while.

If there are any possible solutions I missed I would love to hear them thank you.

[Banfi_Chan]

The problem of Spotify desktop application had been existing for 4 years, it is shocking that they still didn't fix it. The application is not responding to any input after working for several minutes. Volume, skip, pause, start, etc. Nothing is working. Reinstall? Tried. Clean cache? Tried. PC condition? Running well. Spotify? Not working. I think it is easy to reappear this issue. However, dev doesn't feel like trying.

[Straleos]

I'm experiencing these same issues. Persisting after reinstallation. I've installed from Spotify installer, and windows app install both. I experience the same issues. I've cleaned reinstalled both and cleared cache multiple times. I've been experiencing this issue on my desktop intermittently.

There is clearly an issue with the desktop app that has gone unaddressed by Spotify. I'm about to move to Apple Music over this, even though I've been with Spotify for a decade. There is also a significant delay moving between devices. 

And why was I just given a banner ad for a new "Barney the dinosaur" playlist??? I'm sincerely disappointed over the condition of Spotify right now.

[Straleos]

Honestly, I can't really stand putting up with these Spotify app delays any longer. I see issue after issue of this being reported consistently over the last few years, with no confident resolutions. It's always "reinstall", "clear cache", or "try the different version". The fact that this is not being reported as an ongoing issue gives me no confidence that this issue will be resolved in the future.

I'm going to try setting "Proxy type" to "no proxy" but if this issue resurfaces again, I'll be migrating to Apple Music.

[Straleos]

Switching the proxy type had no effect. Goodbye Spotify.

[DJ_Level_3]

The only thing that helps for me is using offline mode, which is very stupid and frustrating. So I have my entire library downloaded and I only go online to download songs I added from my phone.

[strok_777]

For those who alo complain about this topic, have you tried the version 1.2.48.405.gf2c48e6f (64 bits), the time response has been drastically improved. Taking 1 second or less to expand nested directories (which seems acceptable to me)

[bbbbb3]

How long is it going to take just to get Spotify to acknowledge this problem, let alone fix it?

[fre3dysbro]

@suncore your Tip turning the proxy off manually worked for me! Thanks

Spotify ran slow for me as well since the last week. The interface took forever to load and felt sluggish, scrolling through my favorites playlist (~700 songs) was very laggy and the pictures didn't load properly. Clearing the cache and turning off hardware acceleration also didn't seem to make any difference. I didn't do a reinstall. However switching to Proxy type to no proxy seemes to improve it a lot for me. Now it's much faster and more responsive (scrolling through local/streamed playlists, initial start of the programm, play/pause, right clicking songs and adding to favorites or the queue, loading into the settings, etc.).

Dont get me wrong, its still way to slow for a program that's meant for audio streaming and it seems to be getting worse overall.

(my specs: I7-4790K, 16GB DDR3, SATA SSD, GTX 1060 6GB, WIN 10; --> Not the latest and greatest but as I said spotify should run on a potato. Especially since many (or even most?) users pay good money for the service!) 

[f1nn64]

Performance on the desktop app (downloaded directly from spotify website) is awful. Get a new frame every few business days and there is a latency of at least 5 seconds on every button press (play, pause, open new playlist, etc). Nothing I've done has worked, every supposed "solved" solution doesn't work for me, including, but not limited to, turning off hardware acceleration, clearing cache, reinstallation. (reinstallation had the slightest temporary performance uplift). Steadily has gotten worse over the last 2 years with each update to the point of being unusable.

Hardware/OS - Windows 11, i7 10700k, RTX 4070, 16GB RAM, SSD

Despite the low framerate, according to MSI Afterburner, nothing in my system is being utilised (not that it should be for a bit of UI slapped onto a glorified mp3 player)

If there is any solution that can save me it would be most appreciated 🙂

[nicoaleramirez]

I have the same problem on two different powerful machines. The problem is either with the app or with the web player with any Chromium based browser (Chrome, Edge, Opera, Brave, Vivaldi). But using the web player in Firefox, or the Windows 10 (32-bit) version from the official Spotify website, the lag disappears.

[azizk1]

so here is a fix:

https://youtu.be/YNVdA2XbaJ0

[nicoaleramirez]

Thanks a lot! I installed it as a spicetify plugin and it worked, its buttery smooth now!!