Suddenly have poor audio quality on Spotify Desktop

[HorseOnVenus]

Plan

Premium

Country

Netherlands

Device

HP Pavilion G6 (Purchased in 2012; HDD replaced with SSD a few years back)

Intel(R) Core(TM) **bleep** GHz

6.00 GB RAM

Operating System

Windows 10 Home

My Question or Issue

Spotify Desktop has suddenly started working really bad for me: the sound quality was appalling. When I play it from my phone, there are no problems so it's definitely not my speaker that is broken. When I play music from YouTube on my desktop with the same speaker, there is no problem either. I've tried selecting audio quality to be 'high' or 'very high' in the settings, uninstalling and reinstalling Spotify; opening and closing it; rebooting my computer. Nothing has worked so far. 

[GuillaumeC1]

Same issue

[Yordan]

Hi @GuillaumeC1,

Could you confirm that you've tried all of the aforementioned troubleshooting steps in the thread?

You can try navigating to C:\Users\%username%\AppData\Roaming\Spotify\Users\ where you'll find a folder with your Spotify username. Open it, find a file called prefs, open it with Notepad and edit the following lines:

• audio.play_bitrate_non_metered_enumeration - Set the value to 4.
• audio.play_bitrate_non_metered_migrated - Set the value to true.
• audio.play_bitrate_enumeration - Set the value to 4.
• audio.sync_bitrate_enumeration - Set the value to 4.

Once this is done save your changes and restart the app.

It's also worth restarting your PC in Safe Mode with Networking and playing something on Spotify to check if the issue would persist there.

Let us know how it goes. Cheers!

[N-san]

I had the same issue. The problem was fixed after disabling exclusivity on sound output main source.

[synthvibe]

I had the same problem with Spotify on my Windows PC and my headphones (Apple's AirPods Max). I thought of giving up after reading this thread, but then i discovered that for some reason the output device has been set to AirPods Max hand-free, instead of AirPods Max stereo. Not sure what happened there, but after changing to right output device quality was back to perfect.

[SlapStick]

I do have exact same issue, tried multiple things but nothing seems to work.

Looks like issue with compression, although quality is at very high.

Got a USB dongle that connect to my Jabra headset, Apple music plays simply fine.

Spotify web and Windows app are both really bad quality

Youtube also fine

[SlapStick]

NVM found the issue, seems that another application was using the microphone or some process.

After killed that proces, it all sounds good again 😉

[rodentology]

How did you find out that was happening? I have the same issue with audio compression

[justheretohelp]

I had the same issue and this solved it for me. Just to be clear, this was not a setting in spotify but in the output in windows. Where I see the sound output it said handsfree instead of headphones and where I see my bluetooth units it should say connected mic, audio but it said only connected mic. I pressed disconnect and then connect, in the bluetooth settings in windows and then it was back to normal.

[Sebastienbo]

For me it was a bad usb connection, i had to pull out my usb speakers and put them back in, and all was fixed.

Maybe some driver update that went bad after my windows update (it started after my windows update), by replugging it, it seems to got fixed

[wtrvr]

same problem here on a mac 😞

[Sutti70]

I had the same problem on an mac.
I was able to solve it by switching off the equalizer.

[rudolmi]

I've had the same issue with connected headphones. It was not in spotify app but rather me using headphones as 'headset' output device. Once I switched it to 'headphones' the sound quality improved dramatically. 
Hope this helps someone. 🙂