Songs stop and start, choppy playback and dropouts

[erikapuku]

Android, Sprint EVO 4G LTE over 3G I'm a premium subscriber, but simply can't justify paying any more as long as my mobile experience is so terrible. When traveling in my car in the NE (NYC, CT, MA) spotify will play a song or two normally and then start randomly stopping or playing choppy. Start, stop, start, stop. It never crashes entirely, but it's still unlistenable bc of e constant choppiness and dropouts. Sometimes killing the app Nd restarting works, sometimes not, help!

[licenced]

Sounds like buffering issues. Make sure you have the streaming quality setting in Preferences set to Normal instead of high or extreme.

Does the same occur if you play an offline playlist?

[JonathanPyke]

I'm getting the exact same problem, whether it's streaming, downloaded or in either online or offline mode.

Songs fail to start, or suddenly pause during playback for periods of between 1 - 40 seconds, while the timer continues. 

I'm running it on a Galaxy Note, with Ice Cream Sandwich 

I have normal quality on streaming and download
I have uninstalled and reinstalled at least three times currently running 0.5.2.87

I have switched to flight mode during offline playback, switched off data streaming and wifi and a combination of both

None of which has made any difference.

Is there anything else I can try?

[billrosenblatt]

This the same experience I had, which ultimately led me to drop my Spotify Premium subscription and switch to MOG.  The answer is very simple: Spotify "low res" streaming mode is a bandwidth-hogging 96kbps, while MOG uses half the bit rate.  And MOG sounds better because it uses a better codec, while Spotify uses the inferior freeware OGG VORBIS.  You're seeing the result of network congestion during rush hour in the NYC metro area.

Switch to a service with a lower bit rate (64kbps or lower) and your problem will mostly go away.

[Blondiem]

I too am experiencing constant drop outs and songs that start and stop, I'm currently on a free trial for premium however

I don't think I'll keep it going, I also have rhapsody which works great!  Have had no issues with it for some time now and

they have the same music content as spotify, I was going to ditch it however I think now it will be spotify  that goes. I'm running a mac snow leopard but have no problems with anything else.  Any suggestions anyone?

[glenruben]

In case anyone reads this in the future I had the same problem, and found a solution to the choppy, laggy, slow performance. 

Go to settings and choose "delete cache and saved data", at the bottom.

You might also have to remove and reinstall the app but I didn't need to. Might not work for everyone but it helped me, as Spotify builds a large cache file on your memory card. It had even persisted across several reinstalls, a rooting and three different ROMs. 

Hope this can help someone!

[Ed_Frodo]

Hi,

Does anyone know if there is a way to change your preferences, perhaps turn the quality down, on the web player? I am using spotify on a Chromebook so can't amend this at the moment, am a paying member and it seems  a waste given that the musiv counts out 80% of the time.

Cheers

[Peter__]

There is no way to alter the stream quality in the web player, it can only stream at 160kbps (normal desktop quality).

[Kitsune804]

Exact same problem. On a Droid RAZR Max. All else is the same. 

This is a really annoying problem to have. Additionally, Spotify takes forever to load on my phone for no reason that I can ascertain. All other apps start right up. Spotify takes 2-3 minutes to load the app, then an additional 30-45 sec to load a playlist and another 30-45 sec to start playing a song. Really sucks for a paid service.

[Peter__]

What version of android are you running?

[Joe]

@Kitsune804 Do you have a "Your Music" section in your spotify app?

[Kalmora]

I've again also the same issue... Cracking noices. Dropouts... Restarting Spotify ort my PC does not help.

[samardzija12]

Had the same problem on a laptop. It's as simple as battery life. I tried everything and I eventually figured out that the issue was that the comp was running on 40% battery life not plugged in which was causing the issues. Try high battery life!

[billrosenblatt]

I'm sorry but that's ridiculous

[Kalmora]

I'm glad for you!
So at least one knows to solve the problem.
But in my case I'm using a desktop PC. I wish I could solve it also so easily. But luckily I had no the issue since weeks.