Throwing my experiences into the pot for troubleshooting:
- iPhone 3GS (32GB)
- iOS 5.0.1
- ~2GB free (with a clear Spotify cache -- obviously that drops down to basically zero as it fills up)
- 29 playlists
- 3 offline playlists (~100 tracks)
- Only 12 friends linked
- Stream & Sync both set to High Quality
(I was going about to list total number of tracks too, since most are pretty moderate, 30-50 tracks. Until I remembered that Spotify created an 'iTunes' import playlist when I originally set it up, so that's about 4500+ tracks right there... I never actually use or touch that playlist, so I should probably delete it in case it has any relevance to the problem simply by being attached to my user account.)
Observations:
- Spotify crashes on a regular basis, probably 2-3 times an hour on average. Only while playing music, not on startup.
- It's about equally prevalent with streaming tracks (whether wifi or 3G) and with offline playlists (whether in offline or online mode). i.e.: It's not a data connection issue.
- Sometimes (particularly while streaming) the audio will stutter or skip a few times before the app crashes. It's also somewhat more prone to crashing while manually scrubbing through a song.
- Crashes have no relation to the size of the Spotify cache or the free space remaining on the device. Crashes occur just as frequently after the cache is freshly cleared -- either automatically by the iPhone, by running out of free space and then trying to add/update another app; or manually, by reinstalling Spotify -- as when the cache is 1.5GB+ and the phone is running out of space.
- Crashes occurred just as frequently under iOS 4.3
- Crashes occurred just as frequently when I first began using Spotify and the iPhone app and had very few (5-10) playlists. (Although, as mentioned above, I've always had that one huge "iTunes" playlist on my profile from the beginning.)
- Crashes occur whether "Private Session" is toggled on or off.
- Crashes occur whether on battery or on charge.
- Crashes occur whether listening to audio through headphones, loudspeaker, or while docked (to a variety of devices).
- No amount of rebooting, reinstalling, freeing up space, etc., has helped. The problem has been ongoing for months, so I've had plenty of time to test the variables.
My inclination is to blame the cache -- or, more specifically, the way the Spotify "pieces together" tracks from the cache in order to play them as a contiguous unit, since I'm assuming tracks are cached as split, encoded pieces the same way they are on the desktop clients. (In fact my suspicion originates from the fact that the desktop clients themselves have a tendency to hang at particular points in a track that then require manual scrubbing to bypass, even though the remainder of the track is successfully cached already... which suggests that there's simply a hitch transitioning from one split cache segment of a track to the next, rather than in the actual data download.)
I'm happy to test any other scenarios or variables if it will help, since the iPhone is no longer my primary audio device and I don't mind desyncing/reinstalling/wiping offline playlists, etc.
[ Edit: speeling ]
Staff / Moderator/ 2 years ago in Social & Random