Windows 10 (desktop) completely hangs after playing music for a while

[Zoonvanjohan]

I've been using spotify for a while (dunno, a year maybe?) now on my desktop PC running Windows 8.1 without any issues. I've updated my desktop to Windows 10 last week and now issues occur.

After playing music on the spotify desktop application for a while, windows 10 suddenly freezes. It happens randomly somewhere between 15 minutes and 2 hours of playing music, though more often within 15 minutes to 30 minutes.

I've also tried the web-player in Google Chrome, and the same thing happened. 

When the hang occurs, all applications start being unresponsive (clicks don't react, and also sais so in the title-bar), and quickly after the desktop doesn't respond as well. I can't reach taskmanager by pressing Ctrl+Alt+Del or rmb-click on the taskbar and ALt+Tab is not working either. Only the mouse cursor keeps moving, but nowhere I can click where something responds. So a forced reboot is the only way out of it.

The reason why I suspect spotify is that it only happens when spotify is open. I've watched 3 movies in a row without problems on Netflix and I've also been playing games for an entire day without a hang occurring. Then I finish playing games or watching movies, start up spotify top listen some music, and some time later Windows hangs. 

It might be worth noting I have multiple line-outs attached. One is an external USB sound card (Propellerhead Balance), and the other is a TV attached with HDMI. To rule out a soundcard driver issue, I tried them both. The problem has occurred on both.

I also have a sonos system in house with the spotify service configured. To prevent windows form hanging I'm now playing spotify via that. The desktop application of Sonos just reported that it could not play a song, because the spotify service was unavailable. After maybe 10 seconds it worked again. So maybe that kind of hiccup in the connection could also be related to the Windows hang while playing from the spotify desktop application?

Of course Windows shouldn't be hanging because of one application. So I reported this same issue to them as well (somewhere snowed in in all the Windows 10 Feedback .. 🙂 ). But of course Windows should only act as a safety net in this where it shouldn't be nessecary. The issue shouldn't be caused in the first place.

I've reinstalled Spotify already in hopes it might solve it, which it didn't.  

Any thoughts, fixes, workarounds, or plausible denial is appreciated.

Thanks,

Koen

[Nopel]

Similar Problem here.

Not the Complete System hangs, BUT:

Next song not playing. Songs after that comes a commercial spot playing only after a restart of Spotify!

[Zoonvanjohan · Accepted solution]

It looks like it's not spotify which is causing the problems. I just had a complete system hang again while I wasn't using spotify.

As it happens, I'm developing a piece of software which is working with audio using the NAudio open source library. I just started a test cycle and a moment later my system froze. 

I am 100% sure this wasn't the cause of the previous hangs as I wasn't working on this at that time, but it is a suspicious coincidence that both are sound related. At least it now happened without spotify running, so the only thing I'm sure about is that spotify isn't the cause of the issue I'm having. So now my suspicions are back at driver issues.

Just noticed I also have an onboard RealTech soundcard which I didn't use. After googling a bit it appears there are more cases where RealTech doesn't go well hand-in-hand with Windows 10. So I disabled the RealTech sounddriver in the devicemanager and am now running spotify again. Only for an hour now, but so far so good. 

*fingers crossed* 🙂

At for a theory why it does crash with spotify and my application, but not while watching a movie or playing games...

My application iterates all available soundcards so it can list them or even play on them without them being the default soundcard. But my default soundcard is either the HDMI to the TV or the external USB soundcard. Never the RealTech card. So I guess by simply accessing the driver it might be the cause, and a game or movie does not have any interrest for using the non-default soundcard. So perhaps Spotify also accesses the non-default soundcards?

Of course just a theory. It's not yet confirmed it's actually the RealTech card that's causing the issue.

[Zoonvanjohan]

Nope .. again a crash. Disabling the realtech card didn't help. 😞
So I guess I'll have to wait it out for now. Give Windows 10 and the various drivers a little time for updates. Hopefully it'll get fixed with those in a while.

[tfeleal]

This is a curious problem because I have it on my Win10 work desktop but not in my Win10 personal laptop. After some trial and error I found that running spotify with compatibility set to Win7 and Hardware Acceleration OFF in Preferences solved the issue for me. Tree days and no hang so far.

Cheers

[yawper]

I'm having the same issue. Recently installed Windows 10, and when playing Spotify Web Player, the entire system hangs/freezes. No click functionality, CTL + ALT + DEL doesn't work; have to do a hard reboot. I've only had this happen when playing music via the Spotify web player.

[Rock1]

Had to add my two cents here.  I have a new asus laptop with windows 10 on it and I have the exact problem the op has described.  I have wracked my brain trying to solve it.  Updated every driver, uninstalled and tried older drivers, etc etc never finding the answer.  I was so frustrated.  Google brought up many similar problems but with various ideas.  One problem that was fixed was simply uninstalling Mcafee anti virus.  Well I dont have that so I thought it couldnt be the same problem.  

Yesterday I disable spotify in my start up and I notice the problem goes away and has been absent for 48 hours.  I couldn't believe I finally solved my computer issue.

I personally now think it is something actually with Windows 10 and not spotify since others have had issues with Mcafee.  For some reason certain software is causing sound problems with Windows 10 for various reasons.  I now no longer use Spotify on the computer and just stick to using it on a spare tablet I have near by.

Good luck though...just wanted to join to specifically state I know how frustrating this issue can be.

[tifyfer]

Windows 10 (desktop, guest running inside Virtualbox-5.0.26 in a Linux host) completely hangs after playing music for a while. So same here. Windows 10 is up-to-date as of July 2016. Cannot click or do anything, but music keeps playing ...

However this does not happen to me on my laptop running Windows 10 (up-to-date as of July 2016), so maybe this is a bad interaction with some audio layer (hardware/software)? In the case of the virtualbox, this may be the audio hardware emulation layer? 

[alanosman]

I had the same issue.  Had been using Spotify on Windows 10 for about 8 months. I'd noticed that it would take longer and longer to start up.  Eventually, it was not starting, and when it did, it would run for about 20 to 60 minutes and then eventually Windows would go into a freeze.  How an app could do that, I don't know - Windows is supposed to be pretty resilient, but I guess not.  

I stopped using the Windows player and started using the Web client and that was fine for a while.  But I don't really like using the player in a browser because I like to use my keyboard play, forward, pause buttons.  So I decided to look deeper for a solution and found this - that actually worked.  

https://community.spotify.com/t5/Desktop-Linux-Windows-Web-Player/Spotify-Freezing-Issue-in-Windows-...

I wrote this post after several hours of listening to Spotify through the app, with no freezing.

[kevinkleine]

Maybe this'll help:

https://eu.battle.net/forums/en/wow/topic/14821633083#post-2