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Web player stops after playing a song for 9 seconds

Submitted by on ‎2021-04-01 08:40 AM
Status: Fixed

Spotify web player had worked fine for me for a long while (years), but a couple days ago started pausing playback at 9-second position very consistently. Switching to the next song (pressing the "Next" button) sometimes solves the issue for the next song playback (though, not always), then it happens again. Basically, it completely breaks the user experience, as I can't listen to songs which get stuck at 9 seconds, and have to manually press "Next" every 5-10 minutes.

 

I cannot see any errors in Chrome's JavaScript console nor any issues with the network requests. Everything is fine with my local network. The issue is only with Spotify's web player, and as far as I can tell, it is something that started happening just recently.

 

Any advice / help would be much appreciated.

 

Plan: Free

Country: USA

Device: MacBook Pro 2017

Operating System: macOS Big Sur 11.0.1

Web browser: Chrome 89.0.4389.90

Hello everyone,

 

due to recent developments, we're again marking this as Fixed.

 

We've made several backend improvements and from the previous comments those seem to have done the trick for a majority.

 

For anyone still experiencing this, it looks like the cause is a DNS issue via Chrome - something that's not under our control. All network communication for Spotify goes through the same domain name, so if metadata and playback commands are being sent, the domain is already resolved.

 

As such, if you're still having issues, please ensure to take the following steps to resolve this:

  • Change your default DNS in your network settings - It seems CloudFlare (1.1.1.1) is not an ideal pick, so if you have that one, change it to another DNS provider. Based on reports, Google's (8.8.8.8) is working fine.
  • Disable VPN, proxies or ad-blockers - they're not supported and are known to cause playback trouble.
  • Switch to a different browser for the Web Player - We've received reports that Firefox and Edge do not experience interruptions. As Edge and Safari are pre-installed on Windows and Mac those are good alternatives to use. If you don't want to make it your default browser, you can just create a custom shortcut for the Spotify Web Player to open in that browser. A good guide on how to do so can be found here.

 

Shoutout to @danth45 for helping find a solution!

 

Take care!

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Comments
csbubbles
Music Fan
2021-04-05 08:47 AM

@gurman_ua, yep, that resembles my experience as well. I noticed that Spotify could get stuck before as well, but it didn't happen too often (maybe once a week), however, recently it became rather consistent, and now it happens with almost every song, which essentially makes Spotify unusable.

 

No idea if it's going to help, but here are some other observations...

 

Spotify appears to swallow a bunch of errors when doing type casting in JavaScript, these are the most typical ones:

  • "String.prototype.valueOf requires that 'this' be a String"
  • "Number.prototype.toString requires that 'this' be a Number"
  • "Boolean.prototype.toString requires that 'this' be a Boolean"
  • "BigInt.prototype.valueOf requires that 'this' be a BigInt"
  • "this is not a Date object."

which come from "vendor~web-player.a29252e8.js".

 

What's also interesting is that the context of those errors contains the player state, and specifically the "Cast" state seems inconsistent there, some of the errors have it as "NO_DEVICES_AVAILABLE", and in the others it shows up as "NOT_CONNECTED" (a bunch of errors coming immediately after each other). FWIW, I am not casting anything.

 

I also noticed that sometimes Chrome complains about Spotify's JavaScript event handlers taking longer than recommended / expected.

 

See the screenshots below...

Screen Shot 2021-04-04 at 11.20.26 PM.png
Screen Shot 2021-04-04 at 11.19.42 PM.png
Screen Shot 2021-04-04 at 11.16.06 PM.png
Ver
Spotify Legend
2021-04-05 11:26 AM

Hey folks,

 

Thanks for the info 🙂

 

Could you share with us the following additional info? Once we have it, we can pass it on the right team who can investigate this further.

  • Does it happen on newest versions of Edge or Firefox?
  • In case the firewall is enabled, does the issue persist after disabling it?
  • Unload any extensions or Add-Ons, including ad-blockers. Are there any changes?
  • Do you use a VPN or a Proxy?
  • We saw a work laptop being mentioned, are the network and browser settings managed by a different administrator or a company policy?

Keep us in the loop! We'll be right here if you have any questions.

0 Likes
NaVani
Visitor
2021-04-05 04:16 PM

Dear All, as stated above I have the issue that Spotify often (not every song, but still very regularly like every 2nd or 3rd song, it's always different) stops playing the music after 9 seconds although I don't even do anything and I keep the tab open all the time. Spotify shows it's still playing but it isn't. Anyone else who experienced this?

 

Plan

Premium

Country

Germany

Device

Lenovo T480

Operating System

Windows 10

csbubbles
Music Fan
2021-04-05 06:40 PM
  • Does it happen on newest versions of Edge or Firefox?

I don't use either of those, so can't tell.

 

  • In case the firewall is enabled, does the issue persist after disabling it?

I don't have any firewall enabled.

 

  • Unload any extensions or Add-Ons, including ad-blockers. Are there any changes?

I don't have any extensions.

 

  • Do you use a VPN or a Proxy?

I don't use VPNs nor proxy servers.

 

  • We saw a work laptop being mentioned, are the network and browser settings managed by a different administrator or a company policy?

Personal WiFi at home, no additional policies applied by anyone.

 

PS To be honest, I find it a bit odd that you keep asking about network specific stuff, while I believe it was clearly explained already by the folks on this thread that the issue is not related to that. Please read this thread back, it was mentioned already that all network requests that Spotify makes from the web app succeed.

mlH8NLBw5elorTp
Casual Listener
2021-04-05 09:45 PM
Got the same problem for about couple of weeks, also tried everything mentioned here on forums and even more. I think the problem is with your latest 'improvements' described here:
https://community.spotify.com/t5/Community-Blog/The-New-Desktop-App/ba-p/5175848
>In short, the new user interface is the future of the Spotify Desktop client, and over the coming weeks we’ll roll out the new UI to all Desktop users. Many of you will have noticed already, but we’ve based the new experience on the more modern and scalable Web Player codebase, and in doing so made both versions more aligned and easier to use than ever before.
To moderators: please stop circlejerking with relogin/cookies/private window/etc and escalate the problem to your engineers!
Simkaa
Newbie
2021-04-06 04:48 AM
I'm having exactly the same issue... happening on both Premium accounts and quite random. And it's not the actual track because it'll play once I go to next track and back again. So frustrating and it's only been happening for the past week. The only change is that I upgraded to Premium Duo last week... could that impact things??
Simkaa
Newbie
2021-04-06 05:04 AM
I too am having EXACTLY the same issue with music stopping after 9 seconds. It's been working perfectly well until last week. It's not internet or the actual track as I can go to next track, then back to the issue track and it then plays OK. It also appears quite random and then ALWAYS sticks at 9 seconds.
The only change is that I upgraded to Premium Duo last week... and it's happening across both accounts, as well as occurring in my own compilations and other mixes added to my library.
Alex
Moderator
Moderator
2021-04-06 09:24 AM

Hey folks,

 

Thanks for your replies.

 

We've reported this to the right team at Spotify, but we need to gather more info in order to narrow down what is causing the issue for some users.

 

It would be very helpful if you could provide the information that @Ver asked for above. This will help the team greatly.

 

Thank you 🙂

0 Likes
Novy
Moderator
Moderator
2021-04-06 04:30 PM

Hey folks, 

 

Thanks for reaching out about this in the Community. We'll do our best to help you sort this out.

 

@NaVani, could you let us know if this is happening when you use the desktop app, the web player or both? 

 

@Simkaa, not to worry. Keep in mind that your subscription type does not affect this. Could you let us know in which devices this is happening?

 

We'll be on the lookout. 

0 Likes
JoanDough
Newbie
2021-04-06 10:30 PM

I've begun experiencing this problem in the past week or so as well . I tried a few of the 'fixes' like emptying caches, but this annoying glitch continues to persist. It is not worth my time to continue to correct the problem and it is not worth my money to continue using a defective product. I'll be deciding whether or not to cancel Spotify in the next 2 weeks and that decision rests solely on whether or not every song will play past 9 seconds. Advise the higher ups to get working on this because audio and playback problems will drive away dollars faster than any other issue.

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