Spotify iOS app not playing the next track automatically.

[nofreeshows]

Hello there,

I've been using the Spotify iPhone app for about 2 months now. It worked like a dream for the first month and a half but now it's barely usable, in my opinion. When I start the app up and play a song, the app will not automatically play the next track, no matter if shuffle is on or off. I've tried researching the issue before making a post so I'm certain this is not the issue where the next track is not automatically played when you're playing a track from Search (a setting that developers apparently purposely put in--which has its merits). My app is not playing the next track no matter if it's from the Search screen, one of my playlists, or one of my friends' playlists.

I've uninstalled/reinstalled, rebooted my phone, checked all the settings (to my knowledge) and still have not come up with a solution. I am currently running iOS 5.1 on my iPhone. Am I crazy? Spotify is a great product but not being able to use the mobile app is really pushing me to cancel my subscription.

Thanks,

Eric

P.S. Obviously a reply with a solution would be ideal but any reply from a moderator would be great. Even one that just says "We've logged the issue and are looking into it." At least it will give me hope for the future .

[nofreeshows]

I think a lot of the users are describing a separate issue from the one I had been experiencing. With my issue, I was actually listening to songs in their entirety all the way through without stoppage (so it's defintiely not a buffering/connection issue) then unable to listen to the next track automatically. I would have to manually select the next track to listen to and actively click on it to play it.

To answer your question, Bengan, I did not have a lot of available space left when I was experiencing the issue. I just recently cleared out a lot of my hard drive space on my iPhone. I have been testing the Spotify app on "Normal" streaming quality for about 30- min this morning and am happy to say that the app seems to be working as intended. I have also updated my OS to 5.1.1 recently. However, I do not know what else has changed with the settings on my phone between then and now (in case available space is not the root cause).

I will update the thread if I run into the same issue again.

Thanks,

Eric

[streetmapp]

I know I don't have very much space left. But at the same time, for an online streaming app, I don't understand why local space would be needed for tracks/playlists if you AREN'T using offline features. An explanation as to why local space would be necessary would be great.

[streetmapp]

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@nofreeshows wrote:

I think a lot of the users are describing a separate issue from the one I had been experiencing. With my issue, I was actually listening to songs in their entirety all the way through without stoppage (so it's defintiely not a buffering/connection issue) then unable to listen to the next track automatically. I would have to manually select the next track to listen to and actively click on it to play it.

To answer your question, Bengan, I did not have a lot of available space left when I was experiencing the issue. I just recently cleared out a lot of my hard drive space on my iPhone. I have been testing the Spotify app on "Normal" streaming quality for about 30- min this morning and am happy to say that the app seems to be working as intended. I have also updated my OS to 5.1.1 recently. However, I do not know what else has changed with the settings on my phone between then and now (in case available space is not the root cause).

I will update the thread if I run into the same issue again.

Thanks,

Eric

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How is it not a buffering issue just because you can play through a song? The issue even moves over to the next song in the queue, but nothing loads. As if it's trying to load the song, but can't. To me that's connection/buffering all day long.

[nofreeshows]

Because I can click on another song as my current song is ending and it'll play immediately. If it were a connection issue, it would take some time to load/buffer THEN play. Immediate manual playback doesn't scream buffering/connection issue to me.

But I could be totally off base. Who knows, I didn't write the code.

[nofreeshows]

When you stream something, some data is actually cached. The space to cache this data needs to come from somewhere. Again, I'm not really a coder or anything like that but if the issue is indeed linked to a space issue, the lack of cache space could be interfering with automatic playback of the next track. Perhaps why I am able to manually play the next track is because clicking "Skip" or clicking on a specific track clears the cache from the previous song and starts caching the new song.

Hopefully Bengan can shed some light on this! 

[JBinDC]

I don't have much free space at all.  If this impacts playback, can you explain why? 

I could see a slight delay (5 seconds?) if the app is trying to load the next track in the background while playing the current one, but in my experience, the first song that I select will play instantly and flawlessly to the end without interruption, but then nothing happens once that track ends and data for the next track in the playlist appears on the app.  And when I say "nothing happens" I mean there is no playback for multiple minutes if at all.

If this is really the source of the problem, how much free space does one need to maintain (at a minimum) on the iOS device to ensure that the app will operate as expected?

[BigWillTillIDie]

I normally use the spotify app in the offline mode when I'm on the go, and I haven't noticed any issues while streaming, but I do have the same issue with tracks that I've synced to my phone. Is there any fix for that?

[famahlin]

I had the same problem om My iPhone 4s. I tryed to crossfade and tryed to shuffle but nothing helped. I had only 82Mb free space available on my iPhone. I deleted some apps and games so I got 450Mb of free space. I started Spotify and then it worked! No problem playing the next song, no matter what kind of list I am listening to (own playlist, subscribed playlists or searched results) ....don't know if the low memory was the cause but it might have been... /A. Edit: I had the problem for à couple of weeks. I did try to uninstall and reinstall Spotify. iOS 5.1.1 (9B206) spotify 0.5.1.74.gbdf7fe51

[Rwiseman714]

The last few days I've been keeping a closer observation on when the app locks up. It seems to always happen between two tracks that I've synced from my main computer's library. It doesn't ALWAYS happen when I get two tracks in a row from my personal stash, but when it does happen, this has been the case 100% of the time the last few days. I tried un-syncing and then doing a fresh re-sync to see if it would solve the problem, but it didn't. Hope that helps whoever is (hopefully) working on a solution.

[carly]

I'm having the same issue. The song finishes, and the album artwork for the next song comes up, but the song won't play and the time bar at the bottom doesn't show up. The only way I can get the song to play is if I go forward to the next song and then back to the song that was supposed to be playing. Incredibly inconvenient and frustrating.

[bwalker55]

I am having the exact same problem, and there doesn't seem to be any solution here... thinking of canceling my subscription to spotify because of this which sucks because I LOVED spotify before this...  😞

[bwalker55]

You explained my problem exactly... SPOTIFY, if this issue is not fixed in a week, I will cancel my premium subscription.  I cannot justify paying $10/month for a service that does not work.

[famahlin · Accepted solution]

The solution might be to have more available (free) space on you iOS device!? My spotify did not play next song when I had 80mb free space, but when I deleted so that I had 400+mb free space ...Spotify worked and played next song!!!

[Rwiseman714]

Sorry but I had 9 GB available and it still stops playing. I noticed today that it also stopped between songs that I got from Spotify, no longer just my own synced tracks. Also, the new update brought back an old friend. It now crashes regularly again for me! I must say, that even though the iPad app and the ui revamp brought random play stoppage, I don't think it crashed for me since the new app came out. Spotify used to crash several times a day before the new iPad app. Now it's crashing again, twice so far today. GG Spotify! I'm about at the end of my rope with this service now.

[gazbag01]

Again i have the same problem.

Thought the........ excuse while i get up and play the next track for the 30TH F#CKING TIME TODAY..............  update would sort it out but it hasn't.

Plus it even happens on the radio function.

WHY??????????????

I think it DISGUSTING that SPOTIFY  are happy to take your money for a................just playing the next track again............... half arsed APP that doesn't do the one thing you'd expect it to.

I'll soon have to resort to my CD collection - what is this, 2003????

[mikecj]

Any traction on this? I have been experiencing this problem for months now. Very frustrating. Considering dropping it if it can't be resolved.

[oluv]

strange, i seem to have hardly any problems most of the time now. I have selected stream-quality as "normal", because through 3G "high" was using too much bandwidth as i have only 1GB per month free.

sometimes it still happens that spotify stops at the track-end, but meanwhile i have listened to dozens of albums without any problems.

[Bengan]

Hey guys!

We're definitely looking into this issue. We've been able to re-produce this only when playing synced tracks in offline mode, but the issue is very uncommon for us when testing. 

We're trying to re-produce this when listening to radio or just streaming music, as some of you still suffer from this issue even when not playing synced tracks.

In 0.5.2 and earlier we have an issue that the next track won't play if the device is running very low on space and the user is streaming the tracks. This is fixed and the update will out soon.

I'll let you guys know as soon as we've fixed this issue 🙂

[mikecj]

Thanks for the update. I don't know whether this helps or not but here is my experience/situation.

• The iOS device I am using is a 4th Gen iPod Touch. I live rural and have no cell phone reception what-so-ever and predominately work rural.

• Most of my playlists I make available offline as I work outdoors/on the road (I guess you could say).

• On the farm, especially around the main buildings and homestead there are 3 different wifi networks, running off the same ADSL connection. For info two networks are created on Airport extremes and the other is an old Netgear router/modem/wireless

• I find that if I am moving between these networks, the playlists wont play the next track. This also occasionally happens when I am in town where wifi hotspots are more common.

• I have between 4-8gigs free of my 32 gigs on my iPod.

• My iPod is sync'd on a Mac computer but I also have a spotify client running on a vista PC.

• When playing offline tracks within wifi zones, and then moving away from the wifi network all together will usually cause the playlists to freeze.

• A large amount of my sync'd tracks already exisited in my iTunes library. The Local library is quite large (16,000+).

Hope that helps. Probably won't. But hey...

[Bengan]

Thanks a lot Mikecj for the detailed description 🙂

We have several issues that gives the same symptom, that the client won't forward to the next track.

I've seen users who experience this bug by just streaming tracks, some just playing offline synced Spotify tracks, and some who only see this when they are playing offline synced local tracks. Personally I've only seen this issue when playing local tracks, and when doing so it happens quite often.

You could try to remove the local tracks and see if it works, while we work on solving the issues. To do this, you'll need to re-install the application I'm afraid, and re-sync all the tracks.