Spotify version 1.0+ causes unusable delays and freezes

[syNtec]

Plan

Premium

Country

Sweden

Device

High-end PC (AMD Ryzen 9 5950X, RTX 3090, 32 GB RAM, ROG Crosshair VIII Dark Hero) on a 1000 Mbps download and upload internet speed.

Operating System

Windows 10

My Question or Issue

I want this fixed once and for all because I've been using Spotify religiously since beta and I never had any delay or freeze issues until the 1.0+ update. I always thought this was only a temporary issue and would be fixed in the next update because this is unacceptable but it's been almost 10 years now and it's only getting worse... When version 1.0+ was released I downgraded to version 0.9.15.27 which is very responsive with no lag no matter if I had multiple playlists with max amount of songs (10 000). But this version is no longer supported for some reason so I can't use the downgraded version.

There are delays up to a minute before an action is executed when I simply drag a song to a playlist that I want to add. Navigating in Spotify can be just as slow between playlists, artists, albums and even play/pause songs. When I'm listening to a song and want to change to a new song there is randomly a huge delay up to almost a minute and it doesn't matter if it's being played inside one of my playlists or by searching for the song somewhere else. During this delay before the song change I can hear the music from the first song being played normally so it didn't completely freeze or crash, just a very long delayed response. After longer sessions of using Spotify in a day it causes Spotify to freeze for a while and then the app reloads.

I've tried to: perform a clean reinstallation using the Spotify setup from Microsoft Store and the regular app. Logging in on other computers that is on different networks. Deleted most of the playlists that I follow from other users. Clearing cache and I have no downloads or local files added to Spotify, I've only used the app normally for stream use.

I can't discover music with Spotify any longer, please help.

[Joan]

Hi there @syNtec,

Thanks for reaching out. We appreciate your passion and dedication and we'd be happy to help you out.

First of all, what are you referring to by this version 1.0? If it's version 1.0 of the Desktop app, we're long past that and the current version is 1.2.44. Only the latest version is officially supported by us and any methods to downgrade to older versions is not legitimate and we strongly advise against it. 

Besides the outdated version, you mentioned having a large library with many big playlists and this can always have a detrimental effect on performance. The app can support a large number of content, but in general the more you have, the more the performance is likely to degrade. If you have a large number of any of the following things, all of it can affect this:

1. Large number of playlists
2. Many playlists at or near the 10 000 song limit
3. Large number of Liked Songs

If any on this applies to you, try and downsize your library as much as you can and distributing the content evenly. The more you do this, the more the performance will improve.

Hope this clears things up.

[syNtec]

Hey Joan, Thanks for the quick reply!

I meant that this problem started since desktop version 1.0 and upwards, I am using the latest version 1.2.44.405.g81fd6352.
I have around 165 000 liked songs which I've sorted into different playlists by genre and I would prefer to not delete my music history as I need it for my job. The old version of Spotify could easily handle 100 000+ liked songs. When I was able to downgrade I could swap between the old and the latest 1.0+ versions and there was always a delay on the newest versions while the old 0.9.15.27 version could handle unlimited large playlists lagfree, why is that?

[joelbrandonr]

Hey there, did you ever end up finding a solution to this?? I am having a similar problem and went through the issue with Spotify support which basically just was a bunch of reinstallations and checking the settings through like 6 different people. Eventually it just got the point where I gave up and use the web browser to play my music. I similarly also have a high end desktop and it's incredible that the application is so slow that it is quite literally unusable.

[joelbrandonr]

**This is not a solution**

Currently, it's been about a month since I've had to change to the web browser player even after going through support. I am now exhibiting symptoms on my iPhone and iPad application that my computer starting showing about 2-3 months ago when it initially started to slow down. There is now delay between pausing, skipping, and loading songs and the general application. Very sad to see that we have still yet to find any solution after tons of troubleshooting and almost 2-3 months of this issue. Hopefully they find a fix soon or I might just switch subscriptions in music services.