Spotify makes my games lag

[sactori]

I'd really like to listen to music while I'm playing, but I'm unable to use Spotify for that purpose since whenever I'm listening to Spotify I get these several second lag spikes which is caused by my limited upstream bandwidth. Spotify apparently uses p2p (doesn't advertise it very much) and while it does so, it uses ALL bandwidth it can get. It doesn't even matter if you're playing something, it's enough if Spotify is on.

Please make a gaming mode or such that at least limits the amount of bandwidth used instead of using full upstream bandwidth if you don't want to disable it all together.

Right now I'm using Youtube whenever I'm gaming to listen to music and I'm not that far away from just unsubscribing from Spotify since the pros might not justify this big con.

[Peter__ · Accepted solution]

Use the web player instead, it doesn't use p2p.

http://play.spotify.com

[jt122333]

I've noticed this as well. Are there plans to correct this behavior so that Spotify controls the amount of bandwidth it uses?

[Peter__]

You can sort of control it already by reinstalling Spotify and once installed again setting the cache size to the minimum in Edit/Spotify > Preferences > Cache.

With a tiny cache, the amount of content your client will be sharing will be pretty small.

[derwouldd]

I've had this problem since I got this computer. My old computer, an All-in-one desktop (laptop parts) with terrible specs would run it fine while I played League of Legends. (this was many many months ago)

Since I've had this computer, downloaded Spotify. While I play League of Legends, Spotify would switch songs and my ping would go up from ~83 to ~700 which is quite the problem.  I'm using a gaming PC now, well enough to run BF4 on maximum graphic settings. It's not my PC. I thought it was, until I seen others having the problems. 😞

The website isn't much better. It also has a lot of restrictions as to what you can do with the player.

[buresbira]

The web played doesnt respond to play/pause, next/previous keyboard shortcust, and that is how I (and probably most gamers) switch tracks. Also chrome 

[sactori · Accepted solution]

The client doesn't thankfully use p2p sharing anymore so it's fine to use it now.

[azberg]

It's not fine. Just played a game today where Spotify caused the game to lagspike like crazy. Only started working again when I closed Spotify

[buresbira]

http://imgur.com/a/sDX2O

I did a simple test

When switching the song, spotify network usage spikes between 5-30 mbps for about a sec, which is enough to ruing my game. I gues I could find a way to limit the usgage to smth like 300kbps or smt but why should I?

[drake29a]

That's true, Spotify seems to download full song when playback is started, so when you are skipping few songs, spikes appear more frequently, this is really annoying. Couldn't spotify just stream music?

[autodestrukt]

"use the web client" is not a fix. The entire point is to be able to view and control from PS quickmenu. Without that integration I'll just unsub and go back to slacker. Over 3 years later and trying to listen to spotify while gaming still causes so much packet loss that I get dc'd.

[autodestrukt]

It's Sept '17 and I still can't use spotify while playing games since I end up with so much packet loss I d/c.

[asdfsafsdfdsf]

dude, just fricking pirate netlimiter or some similar program, set max download upload for a desired app/program and gg, cmn u can't be that st****

[Groddl]

This is actually **bleep**ing ridiculous, year 2017 and biggest **bleep**ing music streaming company in the world, cannot make a player that does not **bleep**up your internet on regular basis. How about have a **bleep**ing option to just stream and dont predownload songs or something?

[Marsholl]

This might help.

Run game as Full Screen Borderless Windowed Mode, or uncheck hardware accelerator ( spotify/view )