SPOTIFY IS SLOW!!!!

[jethrodawg]

I have been a paid Spotify user for a long time now but I am considering canceling my account because it has been so slow recently. Seems to take several minutes to load my playlists, takes several minutes for a song to start playing, etc. I have done everything I can think of to troubleshoot. I have even hard reset my phone and reinstalled Spotify. Anyone else having these issues?

[Peter__]

What phone and android version are you using? 

[jesu1411]

Hi,

I am having the same problems with my Spotify app on android.  The app takes a long time to load anything, including offline playlists.  It also takes a long time to search / load / start playing songs when on Wi-Fi.  I have tried clearing the phone memory, closing other apps and restarting the phone but even then the performance is still slow.  

Phone: 

Phone: Samsung S3 (Model GT-I9300)

Android version: 4.3

RAM: 831Mb

Please advise!

[Peter__]

Do you have a lot of playlists?

[Joe]

@jesu1411 Do you have the Collection (Your Music) feature?

[jesu1411]

I do have a fair few playlists yes, I'd say 50-75. Related to this, I have an external SD card, is there a way to save music offline to this rather than the internal memory?

I do not see a 'Collection' feature.  If this involves syncing my own music with Spotify then no, I only listen to music/playlists available on Spotify.

[baribob]

I am having the same issue on my Droid M.   The wait times have slowly been creeping up to now it can take me 3-4 minutes to get some music started.  Not always, but especially on verizon data feed.  When I started the service 2.5 yrs ago it seemed one of the market features it boasted was snappy UI response.   What has happened?   I have 1600+ starred tracks and about 210 playlists.

spotify version 0.7.4.610

android  4.1.2

Droid razr M, 1GB RAM, 8GB ROM

[Adam]

@baribob -- if you log into Spotify with an account that doesn't have so many playlists, does that load significantly more quickly?

[baribob]

Good idea Adam, but I don't have access to another premium account with which to test.

[Peter__]

You should be able to log in with a free account too (if you have one of those spare) 😉

[user-removed]

@jethrodog

Do you see this behavior with downloaded playlists as well?

Have you tried putting the app in offline mode and playing a downloaded playlist to see if the problem continues?

I'm also experiencing this problem but, today, playlists are loading and playing very quickly when in offline mode.

[cissi]

I have the same problem. I have about 50 playlists sorted under 10 folders, and only 1-10 playlists offline. I have tride do empty all data several times, and also reinstalled Spotify and tried with only one short playlist in offline mode, and it is still the same, it is slow, also downloaded playlists. This has been for a couple of weeks now, but getting slower and slower all the time. Since Monday evening I also have the problem that it keeps loggin out of my acount. Everytime spotify is not active (that is: not playing for about 5 min.), it kicks me out and I need to log in again, wich may be tricky since I do not have internet-conection att all times, and it is time-consuming always entering username and password again and again. Running android 4.1.2 and Spotify 0.74.610.gd7332b3

[Joe]

@ciassi What device are you using?

[cissi]

Sony Xperia Acro S, 

By the way I'm getting closer to a solution. My guess is that there are some corrupt files that aren't removed properly when deinstalling. I did a clean removal of the app, removed the SD-card and reinstalled the app. It then works properly at normal speed and no sign-in problems, the only thing is that all saved music now ends up on the internal memory instead of the much bigger and almost empty SD-drive. My next step now is to try to clean up my SD-card, the phone-iternal SD-emptying service doesn't work (yes, I have made back-ups), nor can I access all files from the computer via USB-cable to the phone, and I can't even find my microSD/normalSD adaptor to insert the card directly into the computer... well that is all for some other forum, or for me to tidy my drawers. Well all in all, Spotify works well again and that was what it was all about! (Would be curious though wich where the corrupt files and how may the be removed, for others with the same problem)

[Hansen92]

Same problem here, i use a Samsung s3 active.

[Joe]

External SD cards on android do seem to cause issues for some people and not necessarily just with spotify. You'll find lots of posts in the main android forums if you do a google search. The trouble is that there are so many possible causes ranging from poor contacts to poorly made cards that I doubt there will ever be a solution which will work for everyone.

I see Peter linked you to the post detailing the location of the spotify cache file. Be interested to hear how things go 🙂

[cissi]

Problem solved! It was a failing SD-card. When I finally found the micro-SD/SD-adaptor and inserted the card into the computer, the disk-utility could only find 8GB out of 32GB, and those 8 where red marked damaged. Now with a new card and spotify reinstalled everything works just fine, just as it should. Thanks Community for all help!

[user-removed]

I can confirm that this issue appears to be related to the removable SD card for me as well.

If I uninstall spotify, unmount the SD card and then reinstall spotify, playlists load immediately and songs play as soon as they are started. I have installed spotify several times now with and without the SD card mounted and the problems with playlists taking a long time to load or songs not starting immediately consistently occurs when spotify was installed with the SD card mounted.

So, if you are having problems with spotify running very slowly and you have a removable SD card installed try uninstalling spotify, unmount the SD card and then reinstall spotify. You can remount the SD card after spotify is installed and downloaded playlists will be saved to the SD card.

[Joe]

@user-removed Are you sure that "downloaded playlists will be saved to the SD card"? As far as I know, installing spotify without an external SD card will result in the cache being created in the internal storage. I don't think spotify can handle two cache locations and all music is stored in the cache.

[user-removed]

Yes, when I remount the SD card and download playlists they are saved to the external SD card. I verified that through application manager, SD Card Data increases and unmounting the sd card stops playback.

Interestingly, if I install spotify while the sd card is mounted it is impossible to tell through application manager where the downloaded playlists are being stored. SD Card Data shows 0 even when many large playlists are downloaded. Total application data also does not change from ~24mb. They are, however, saved to the sd card because unmounting stops playback. Not sure if this is an Android or Spotify problem.

EDIT - So, for me anyway, playlists are stored to the sd card if the sd card was or was not mounted when spotify was installed. I have not tried downloading a playlist and then mounting the sd card. Not sure what would happen then.

Galaxy S3 Android 4.3