Spotify Bugs causing computer to crash

[Jimbo9294]

I did not want to think it was true, but Spotify (as it is now) will cause your Computer to crash.

Today it happened twice. I had to do a system restore and and after a process of elimination it is the current free version that is the problem. Many and I do mean many bugs need to be worked out with the free version. I am gonna upgrade to a premium version to see if the same bugs are there. Instead of putting so much effort into continuing to get music to your servers (or whatever it is you doing, now). Your team needs to work on the code...Most user will be using the free version. This is a disappointment, because I like idea behind the app.

You can email for specifics, Spotify admin.

Sincerely

Jimbo9294@hotmail.com

[jbmetrics]

The problem of Spotify crashing and the memory leak still have continued for the last two updates of Spotify and the latest update of iTunes 10.6.3.25 (the two do not play well together).  iTunes has added a new bug of not deallocating memory on a currently playing song when you activately click on a different song.  iTunes will balloon up to just over 1 GB of memory when it will crash.  However, if connected between your local files on iTunes and Spotify, the problem is amplified because Spotify then also continues to allocate more memory and (forget to unallocate memory) when it tries to sync with iTunes.  The easiest way to see the effect is to add music to your iTunes library and watch when Spotify tries to sync up, the memory usage increases, but never decreases once the scanning is done.  This problem is repeatable on XP, Vista (both x32 & x64 versions), and Windows 7 x64

[eleventy4]

Hi, I had a couple of crashes the other day related to playing WAV files.  Ten seconds into the song, a different song each time, the audio started skipping, and the computer froze completely with the exception of the mouse cursor.  I was very excited about Spotify, as I've only had it a few days.  I would upgrade, but am not sure if these bugs would still be there.  Running Windows 7 64 bit, Asus laptop, plenty of RAM, less than a year old.

[jbmetrics]

iTunes has updated to 10.7 and the problem Between Spotify and iTunes still exists. Although some memory recovery is happening in iTunes now, they haven't stopped the major memory leak from album artwork.  The fastest way to get both to crash is to add new music to iTunes library.  The workaround for now is to quit Spotify while adding music to iTunes library and then bring up Spotify afterward and let it sync before playing music on Spotify or closing iTunes when playing Spotify.

[Owlkill]

I think it's pretty terrible that this has been going on since April and we're still yet to hear back from the devs - as a paying subscriber I'm deeply unimpressed. The frequency of this actually seems to have increased in the past few days. If there's any spotify tech people or devs reading this, what do you need from us to fix this? 

[MTWMusic]

Owlkill's post was a few months ago, but I currently just started encountering the same issue. I started using Spotify within this last month and just recently within the past 2 weeks, my computer will simply freeze up and I cannot do anything other than manually shut off my system. Sometimes it freezes all together while the spinning "loading" wheel (for Windows 7 Home Premium), or sometimes the screen will be black, but I can move the mouse around. 

I've uninstalled Spotify altogether within the past few days, and I still seem to have issues of leaving the desktop stationary/not in use and when I come back - from 5 minutes or more - and I can't do anything. I only run maybe 2 programs at a time!

[francodimo]

Hello,

I installed spotify yesterday and everything seemed to be fine but today the computer didn't start.

The help programm restored the last stabil version and  -  spotify was gone ....

I'm a bit confused of trying it again ... (?)

I need the PC for work so I'd better leave spotify outside?

[Peter__]

---

@francodimo wrote:

Hello,

I installed spotify yesterday and everything seemed to be fine but today the computer didn't start.

The help programm restored the last stabil version and  -  spotify was gone ....

I'm a bit confused of trying it again ... (?)

I need the PC for work so I'd better leave spotify outside?

---

Hey! Welcome to the community 🙂 

That is definitely weird, but I think most likely a coincidence, I have never heard of that happening due to Spotify before! 

Peter

[JakeRingo]

I got a brand new "Acer Aspire M" about 5 months ago with a 1 Terabyte hard drive and 6 GB of RAM. Since I got Spotify Premium, my laptop keeps telling me to shut down Spotify specifically because my memory is low on my computer and if I don't shut it down then my computer freezes. What is taking up all this memory? I figured that 6 GB of memory is more than plenty for a laptop but Spotify seems to be draining it all. On top of the sorting issue I have with the mobile app, and the radio problem I have where it keeps playing the same songs over and over again, this is making me rethink my decision of using spotify as my source of music. Please fix something spotify!!! Just one thing!!! Every thread that I look at has so many people complaining but you guys can't even do as much as updating the mobile app so we can sort through our artists instead of just songs by order they were added. I have 1000 songs on starred playlist and it takes forever to find stuff

[Peter__]

---

@JakeRingo wrote:

I got a brand new "Acer Aspire M" about 5 months ago with a 1 Terabyte hard drive and 6 GB of RAM. Since I got Spotify Premium, my laptop keeps telling me to shut down Spotify specifically because my memory is low on my computer and if I don't shut it down then my computer freezes. What is taking up all this memory? I figured that 6 GB of memory is more than plenty for a laptop but Spotify seems to be draining it all. On top of the sorting issue I have with the mobile app, and the radio problem I have where it keeps playing the same songs over and over again, this is making me rethink my decision of using spotify as my source of music. Please fix something spotify!!! Just one thing!!! Every thread that I look at has so many people complaining but you guys can't even do as much as updating the mobile app so we can sort through our artists instead of just songs by order they were added. I have 1000 songs on starred playlist and it takes forever to find stuff

---

6GB is a lot of RAM if Spotify is eating through all of that, normally it only needs a few 100 MB's. Next time this happens, right click on the taskbar and click "Start Task Manager", then at the top of that window that appears, go to the Processes tab and click on the top of the Memory column to sort by memory use. 

Can you take a screenshot of that and upload it here? 

Peter

[andermann]

Spotify is the only program now that will crash my computer.  In the past 2 weeks I've had it happen on a Lenovo w520 and a Lenovo x230,  both running win7 Pro.  Spotify (Premium) will be playing and then suddenly stop, and everything freezes.  I can't bring up task manager and so have to reboot.  Looking at Event Viewer doesn't help much, this time I get the message below.  It's not at the point yet where I won't run Spotify, but it's very annoying, reminds me of Windows 95 days when it seemed any program was a potential killer.

//./root/CIMV2

SELECT * FROM __InstanceModificationEvent WITHIN 60 WHERE TargetInstance ISA "Win32_Processor" AND TargetInstance.LoadPercentage > 99

0x80041003

[bernvall]

I installed Spotify a couple of days ago and it keeps freezing my computer, whilst also making this really weird sound coming out of my laptop. 

I tried many different ways in fixing this problem yet none seem to be working. these include:

1) going on preferecnes and unchecking "Hardware Acceleration"

2) going on preference and reducing the cache used from 10GB to 3GB

3) clean uninstall and reinstalled to the latest version
4) updated WIndows Upddate and all my drivers

5) rightclick on spotify, "properties", "compatibility mode" and unchecked "run on compatibility mode"

Btw i have Windoes 7, laptop is about 4 years old,  HP Pavillion dv6 first generation i5 Intel CPU 2.27ghz, 4GB RAM

[Peter__]

When you say freezing your computer does it become totally unresponsive indefinitely or is it temporary?

[WithstandLaser]

I've had the exact same problem as bernvail.

The Spotify desktop app will - at random while playing a song - freeze my computer and emit a weird noise. My computer will not respond and i'm forced to turn it off and back on again.

I (independently from this thread, before I even saw it even) did all the things that bernvail has tried all to no avail.

I assumed it was just my computer, but i'm relieved to know someone else has reported it somewhere. It has only started happening since the latest update.

My laptop is running Windows 7 Home Premium, has a 2.30GhZ i5 Intel Core processor and 8GB Ram.

[Peter__]

Just to rule out GPU acceleration is doing this (it causes strange things to happen on my hybrid graphics desktop) can you try launching Spotify like outlined in this post and see if it still freezes?

[bernvall]

tottaly unresponsve, meaning i have to switch off the laptop and restart it.

What i tried doing now is not allowing spotify to access any of my local files, because i thought that the reason spotify wascrashing is that its exponentiallly taking up my memory eventually  causing it to crash.

Till now it hasnt crashed yet, will keep you updated if anything happens

[WithstandLaser]

@bernvail: Yeah, I don't think it's the local files. I don't have any local files attached or accessable to Spotify and mine still crashes my laptop.

@Peter: Here's the thing - Spotify doesn't crash my computer every time I use it, just enough that it's a notable. It's happened three times in one week and i've used Spotify more than that. So if I do run with that, it won't really be worthwhile unless I run it like that every single time, which is unweildy. I will absolutely try it, though.

Again, this wasn't a problem until the most recent update to the app, but I can't find a changelog for the new version (0.97.16 if i'm not wrong?) to even make a guess at what could be doing this.

UPDATE (1-10-14): my version of Spotify is 0.9.6.81, not 0.9.7.x as I had previously assumed

[Joe]

Does the windows event viewer show anything relevant to these crashes?

[andermann]

I had posted a while ago re Spotify causing crashes on two different laptops.  The problem seems to have cleared up after recent releases of Spotify, saving me from having to resort to futzing with the command line, as one link subsequent to my post suggested.  yay.

[WithstandLaser]

@Peter: OK, I did this and I haven't seen any crashes since. My question is, do I have to keep running Spotify through the run dialouge every time I want to use it, or just once?

I also just got an update. Hopefully that will fix whatever this issue is.

[Peter__]

If you want to disable those hardware acceleration flags, you would need to launch it like that everytime or edit the Spotify shortcut you use to launch Spotify to include them. 

Try it without in the new version and let us know!