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Plan
Premium
Country
Netherlands
Device
DELL XPS15
Operating System
Windows 10
My Question or Issue
Every now and then I notice my harddrive clogging up with cache data from several apps and I start cleaning it out.
At first I suspected it to be cached data so I could listen to the songs without internet connection.. but its not. the app simply wont play the songs.
there are over 2500 files in the %appdata%/local/spotify/data directory, most of those are in 2character labeled directories. On average I think I remove ~10-15GB of music data from the %appdata% directory.
I expected there to be some data but not a huge amount more than the music I listen to.
On my phone I have the playlist set to download, it has about 5GB stored. This indicates the playlist must be about that size.
is there a way to prevent the desktop app from clogging up my harddrive?
I'm (still) having the same issue. There's no legitimate reason for a streaming app to pre-load gigabytes of "just in case" data, wasting both storage space and bandwidth.
There may be a scenario where that makes sense but any "feature" that wastes system resources to that degree should be optional and off by default.
the worst part is that it's cached in a persistent directory.
and on top of that its only usable if the files are marked for download, all other music files are just using up the disk.
I have to wonder just how unreliable their network is if they feel they need to pre-load gigabytes of data. YouTube, Netflix, etc manage to struggle by streaming HD video without issue and no pre-loading. Why is Spotify's service so poor that they need to pre-load audio which is in no way data intensive? It sure doesn't look like they have faith in their service.
i also verified the problem that C:\Users\pkulkarni\AppData\Local\Spotify\Data keeps growing..though one need to delete the data regularly , one advantages is if you going to replay same past song on spotify then it will save bandwidth by not downloading that song again instead it will play from cache.
This is a bit late reply, but I found out a workaround for this issue.
One can create a new tiny partition on the hard disk, and just change the offline storage location there. This way one can control how much space Spotify can hog. In my case, I saved 10 GB storage space.
Creating a new partition sounds scary but is pretty easy, just check Youtube for some tutorial.
Thanks very much for the solution. I haven't implemented yet, but just wanted to express both gratitude and disbelief that this is the best solution avaialble. Spotify, what the f**k?
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