Spotify long loading times, especially audiobooks

[bastidmn]

Plan

Premium Family

Country

Germany

Device

Samsung Galaxy 8

Operating System

Android 9.0 Pie

Hello guys,

for about the last 2-3 weeks a strange bug occurs regularly on my daily spotify use.

When I start the app from cold it is fast and responsible, loads music and does all the things I want it to do.

But god forbid if I try to play an audiobook or even look at such a playlist. As soon as I click on an audiobook playlist or album, Im stuck in the loading animation were the cover and tracks are grey plain fields.

The informations just wont load at all at any given time and as soon as this occurs, all other albums and UI like in-app settings are slow or just not working at all. 

This happens both in airplane mode and on wifi/4g

After hard closing the app, most of the times everythings right until it happens again.

It is very frustrating and I dont know any further what to do.

The app is working fine on all other devices in my plan (Win10) and in the family plan, like on a P20, A70, S10e and several Windows machines without these issues.

This Ive done/solved:

-networking is fine (100k stable, full wifi)

-enough free storage on both sd and onboard (30gb/40gb)

-app and os up to date

-deleted the cache about 100x times already

-50x reboot and system cleaning

-about 10x full clean reinstall, issues everytime

Please help me fix this!

[Mario]

Hey @bastidmn,

Thanks for reaching out about this here in the Community. 

Seems like what you've experienced is specific to your phone and since you're using an SD card with it, you might need to format it and then reinstall Spotify. Also, if you're using one, make sure it's not formatted as "Internal" memory since formatting an SD Card to be used as Internal memory (called "Adoptable Storage") creates issues with the Spotify cache.

Also, it'd be helpful to confirm that the Spotify app has all the required permissions on your phone and is white-listed for any battery-saver or cache-cleaner apps or tools.

Let us know how you get on. We'll look out for your reply!

[bastidmn]

Hey, thank you, kind mod,

after refactoring and clearing my sd card, everything is working fine right now, maybe there were some corrupted files.

If the problem comes up again Im maybe asking again for your help.

But for now, thank you and have a great day!

[bastidmn]

Hello (@Mario), quick update here,

after really promising performance it happens again, the exact same thing.

I just really dont know what to do anymore.

//Edit: Now when I try to open the track menu on a song (3 dots) I get the message "Go online to see the menu" while songs are casually downloading.

//Edit2: After about 5 minutes the blank grey pattern turns into the actual playlist, but I cant play tracks out of it.

I still only expirence this on "audiobooks" (no podcast)

[kade1245]

Hi, I have the same issues with Xiaomi Note 8 Pro and bq aquaris x2 pro phones. Using Spotify premium for years and hear audiobooks a lot. Was always fine. For about a week or two it is very buggy. Seems to effect albums with large amount of tracks only. Pretty sad as most audiobooks are effected.

[Johnnyiy]

I have the same problems. 😞 can you open the settings ? Greetings.

[thoppler]

Hi,

I have the same, quite frustrating problem. It only happens with large audio books - when I try to open an album, it takes very long until the tracks are listed

What else can I say?
- I'm on Android 10
- I do not have an external SD card installed
- I did a clean install a couple of times but this only helped for some hours

Finally I installed an older version (8.4.0.539) which I found in another community thread (https://community.spotify.com/t5/Android/How-do-I-install-the-previous-version/td-p/452934)
This version runs perfectly! No lags, very responsive while opening audio books.

Please fix the issue in the current version

[TheDude1711]

Same issue here on two Android devices.

OnePlus X - Android 9

Motorola Moto G 2015 - Android 8.1

I tried:

1. Remove Cache

2. Remove Data

3. Uninstall / Reinstall

4. Unconnect all devices in profile

5. Using a complete new profile connected in my family group.

Nothing had helped.

6. Installed older versions from uptodown Website. Version 8.5.51.941 is the last one without that issue.

My testing albums are:

https://open.spotify.com/album/7osWCNCcvGfqP31G7281iL?si=IvCY4SqzQi-pGgJH1Dp78Q

https://open.spotify.com/album/42Y4w1G7z1k1c9b3UtCFhc?si=Ljb3tMgdTJaCinaOWe87kQ

https://open.spotify.com/album/7dFeHY8QOEHiKTgJNCjoUE?si=CbT_13fSQOGacJz5GPjcJA

It is very easy for me to reproduce. Switch between these albums. Download an album restart the app one or two times. Voila: album loading times are terrible.

Please fix this bug! I'm paying a lot of money and the app is not usable for me, because I mainly listen to audiobooks.

Best regards

Phillip

[TheDude1711]

I forgot: I switched between SD and internal storage without success, too.

[TheDude1711]

I created a bug report at spotify.com.

[TheDude1711]

I got test credentials to login and reproduce the problem. But after two hours of heavy testing the problem didn't occur. Very strange, because with my two normal accounts it only lasts minutes to reproduce the bug after reinstalling the app.

[TheDude1711]

My current report to the support team:

today I have tested a lot and reinstalled the app in between. But I can't reproduce the performance problem with the test account. With my normal account I have the problems directly after the installation. I made screencasts of both behaviors.

With the test account (everything is fast): xxx

With my normal account (unusable, only the music album loads in an acceptable time): xxx

[TheDude1711]

Very fast reply from the support team:

We are glad to hear that the Premium test account worked fine and it was fast. That said, we think that creating a new account will be the best and you will not see this error as in your current account. ...

[TheDude1711]

But I have to tell them, that I tested that already:

I have made a complete new account for testing and added it to my family group, but on the next day I had the same problem. So I don't think this is fixing my issue.

[TheDude1711]

Tonight or went back and forth with the various support staff by mail. Apparently a lot of information got lost, especially from my first contact, so that I would have to reject some suggestions with reference to already delivered information. In addition to that, they also explicitly requested information that I had already delivered in the last days. This is probably due to the fact that each mail was processed by a different employee and they only ever referred to the last mail. What a pity. This could work better. They react quickly, but not effectively.

[TheDude1711]

New tip from the support team:

As a next step can you please try to add the "Die Drei ???" albums to a playlist and then remove them from your Library?

[TheDude1711]

My testing results:

the results are promising!

What I have done:
- deleted all (round about 40) albums of the artist (Die drei ???) from my library
- created a new playlist called "Inka" for the album "Das Grab der Inka Mumie" of the artist "Die drei ???"

Now the behavior is (see video):
- playlist "Inka" loads fast
- album "Das Grab der Inka Mumie" loads fast (very good 🙂 )
- another album (still included in my library) loads very slow
- after opening the other album, the fast playlist and album are not loading anymore

[TheDude1711]

A (too) fast response from Spotify:

Perfect! Glad to hear everything seems to be working fine now 🙂

[TheDude1711]

Really? Do I write such a bad English?

[TheDude1711]

To clarify that it is not perfect I sent this response:

Stop!

"Promising" means a little bit better, not "everything is fine".

After opening an album from my library the app is unusable again. Please read my complete mail, I spent a lot of time in reproducing the bug, creating videos and describing my experiences after each suggestion of a support member. It would be very nice if this wasn't all for nothing.