Impossible to listen to audio books when using Android Auto

[pmattke]

Plan

Premium

Country

Germany

Device

Samsung Galaxy S9+ & Skoda Fabia (Built end of 2018)

Operating System

Android Pie

My Question or Issue

Well, it's not technically  impossible to play audio books via Android Auto, but listening to them really sucks. In an audio book there are often short segments of silence, introduced by the reader. It seems like, when silence of a certain minimal duration occurs, spotify tries to suppress any noise unless the segment of silence ended. But you can actually hear that audio drops back in too late. The first syllable of the first word is simply not played. If the sentence begins with a short word, it can often happen that this complete word is not audible. This makes it hard to enjoy the audiobook, because one has to think about what word or syllable could have been skipped. Here's the audio book I wanted to listen to, but stopped after two minutes because the described behaviour was really annoying:

spotify:album:6o6QcodfWGp4LpCPwUzyO9

Btw: As far as I know, this behaviour only occurs when connecting Android Auto to a real car via USB. It seems to work fine, if one just uses Android Auto on the phone's own display. So I guess there's something wrong with the USB Audio Routing.

Btw 2: I also observed this behaviour with music, when listening to an album or playlist. If there is a short segment of silence between two songs (and no gapless transition), you can hear that a portion of the beginning of the next song is being skipped, like the first beat or so. This is also annoying, but at least we can listen to the rest of the song uninterrupted then. For audio books, this is really hard.

Btw 3: Sometimes I use "GoneMad Music Player" via Android Auto to listen to some local music files on my phone. I never observed the described behaviour when using that player. This underlines my suspicion, that there is an issue within Spotify, and not within Android Auto, the USB Audio Routing or even the car's entertainment system.

I would find it interesting to understand why this behaviour exists, if it's not a bug.

And of course I hope it will be fixed very soon, so I can enjoy audio books during my daily drives between work and home.