Spotify desktop app lags/stutters while using Chrome, Firefox etc.

[ImPureGold]

Dear Community,

I read many topics, posts, solutions yet nothing solved my problem.

When the desktop app is playing offline (downloaded) music and Chrome is loading page(s), Spotify (and my cursor) starts to stutter heavily. It's even worse when I stream music. 

I tried with Firefox and got a WORSE result. It's frustrating...

Looks like the problem occurs only when I'm using web browsers. I can play AAA games (like The Witcher 3) and play music in the background and don't have a problem. 

What I tried so far: in Power Setting made the CPU Min. 100% (Max. is also at 100%). It got a little better, but not perfect. Turned off Hardware Acceleration, Updated Chrome and the Spotify desktop app. Tried to run the app with commands, and played with Flash players settings. This problem came out of nowhere, started about 1 week ago. Nothing changed what I'm aware of.

Tried the Web Player but can't stream music in 5.1 ch, only 2.0 so I'm not going to use it.

Software, hardware:

Spotify Premium Desktop App: 1.0.39.157.g674ae377 (latest)

Google Chrome: 54.0.2840.71 m (64-bit) (latest v54 build)

Mozilla Firefox: 47.0.1 (latest)

Windows 10 x64 Anniversary Edition (latest)

- Intel i5-3570k (overlocked to 4.2GHz and has a decent cooler, never overheating)

- nVidia GTX 960 4GB (overclocked by 10%, and has decent cooler, never overheating)

- 16GB 1866MHz Kingston HyperX Fury

- AuzenTech X-Fi Prelude 7.1 dedicated Sound Card (using custom drivers as the company went out of business years ago - but it wasn't a problem before!)

- Desktop app (and browsers too) is installend on Samsung 840 Pro 256GB SSD

- The downloaded (cached) music is on Western Digital Caviar Green 3TB HDD

- Net: 100/10 mbit/s

As you see, my configuration could handle a web browser and Spotify simultaneously. There are not many running background apps, only a few like Kaspersky, HDD Sentinel, a gaming mouse editor, Google Drive, PrtScrn program.

On the attached picture, there is a spike... that occured when my system started lagging. 1: CPU, 2: Disk, 3: Network, 4: Memory.

If you have a solution, please help me out. I know what I do, please skip the mandatory tests like: have you tried to restart the program? :))

Thank you in advance.

[ImPureGold · Accepted solution]

So... After I did everything I mentioned, and posted my struggle here, I turned on and off some services (permanent settings). I noticed in Spotify's setting Proxy was set to Auto, so I set it to No Proxy. Relocated the cache to SSD and used CCleaner to clean the registry and cache of the apps. After all, I restarted the computer (first time today) and voila, something made my problem go away from the above mentioned things. WEIRD, but good. I'm happy now. 🙂

[Dreadlord]

Hey @ImPureGold,

Welcome to Spotify Community!
Glad you solved the problem, but quick warning that Spotify is causing high disk I/O and it will shorten your SSD life span:) 

[ImPureGold]

Wow & meh. 
Thank you for your reply. 

The problem is, I don't exactly know which solved the mistery. And I also don't know what setting had effect after restart. Maybe the first solution I tried would have solve it, but it needed a restart after I made the modification... My English skills fail me, I can't describe it with the correct grammar and conditional tenses, sorry.

Fingers cross for the SSD to survive my music mania. :))

[Dreadlord]

@ImPureGold, it's okay. : )

If you want to test if the issue was the hard drive you can start Spotify from the CMD with the following command:

%appdata%/Spotify/Spotify.exe --cache-path=/enter/path/to/nonssd/disk/here

This is going to create new cache folder depending on the parameter your pass to --cache-path 🙂

[ImPureGold]

You are a true Jedi!

I copied the address of its old cache location on the HDD and pushed Enter. Started and works perfectly. 

I'm going to change it back soon (from SSD to HDD). 

Like sent again, thanks.