Spotify free is sooooooo slow - any suggestions?

[zachvinson]

I have a macbook pro running OSX 10.9.5, with a 2.5ghz i5 and 4GB of ram, and Spotify Free is insanely slow.

I opened it a earlier this morning, and after seven minutes, I still wasn't able to get a single artist's page to load. Then I tried to quit the program, and three minutes later it still hadn't quit so I had to force quit. No other application on my computer acts remotely as slow as spotify.

Any suggestions as to how to fix this?

Meanwhile, back to itunes...

[Jonahman10]

Has this always occured or is this relatively new development? Just for curiosity's sake, does the web browser version of spotify also load fairly slow for you? A couple people on different operating systems have had success at speeding up spotify by going to  Edit, Preferences, Local Files, and then Unchecking "Downloads" in your client. Does that seem to work for you.

[zachvinson]

Thanks for the help. It's always been like that to slightly varying degrees. This morning it finally irritated me enough to ask someone about it.

I had never tried the browser version before, but that isn't giving me any problems at all. Still would rather use the desktop version if I could get it working right.

I had already unchecked Downloads, iTunes, and My Music from the Preferences menu, so that's not the problem...

[Jonahman10]

Under preferences, there are advanced settings, and one of them enables hardware acceleration, and I have noticed a few cases where deselecting that option may actually improve speed in certain ciircumstances.

[zachvinson]

Hmm, I don't have that option under advanced settings. The only options that ads are Crossfade playback, Start Spotify automatically, and Proxy options.

But I did realize there was a newer version of Spotify available, so I updated that...we'll see if that makes a difference.