Sound stops, track keeps going, App becomes unresponsive

[NoMoreAngel]

Plan

Premium

Country

Germany

Device

PC

Operating System

Windows 10 1809

My Question or Issue

 Spotify quite often "crashes". It stops outputting Sound but shows the Track still as playing. When that happens you can't stop/start the track again and also can't jump to the next song. The whole program becomes unresponsive and goes up in CPU usage, from normally ~0.4-4% up to 15%.

Trying to close Spotify via rightclick on the trayicon removes 3 out of the 4 process. The last one stays and prevents a restart of Spotify until you close it manually via the Taskmanager. Only then you can restart Spotify, otherwise it shows an errormessage which I currently can't remember.

Sometimes I can hear music for hours, sometimes not even minutes without the problem. There is no specific song that crashes the programm, neither a action I take. It also happened when the PC was only playing music and I weren't even using it. So I can't reproduce it, it just happens randomly.

And yes I already reinstalled the App and checked the folder in AppData if it got completly deleted between installs (it did).

The attached screenshot shows the extreme CPU-Usage when Spotify crashes. The CPU never gets overloaded, RAM never gets full, Internet Connection isn't to slow nor does it disconnect or lag-spike, so those things can't be a problem.

[NoMoreAngel]

Is there any chance I will ever get a reply to this?

[Sebasty]

Hey @NoMoreAngel

Let me know what audio devices and drivers are you using. 🙂

You may need to roll back to default audio driver (especially when you're on Realtek), but if you use any other audio devices that have their own drivers, such as Focusrite or Asus, I recommend disabling the audio device you're not using.

If you're using an onboard audio device, try this:

 in Device Manager, right-click (or press and hold) the audio driver, and then select Uninstall. Restart your device and Windows will attempt to reinstall the driver.

And if that didn't work, try using the generic audio driver that comes with Windows. Here's how:

Open Device Manager, right-click (or press and hold) your audio driver > Update driver > Browse my computer for driver software > Let me pick from a list of device drivers on my computer, select High Definition Audio Device, select Next, and follow the instructions to install it.

Let me know how it goes. 🙂

[NoMoreAngel]

Hey @Sebasty,

thanks for your reply and suggestions. My sound devices are all using the Microsoft/Windows10 driver in Version 10.0.17763.1, so we got that out of the way. But I let Windows reinstall the driver/device anyways. I also disabled all the audiodevices that aren't used frequently. Sadly that didn't change anything and spotify still crashes 😕

[Sebasty]

Hey @NoMoreAngel

Did letting Windows reinstall drivers work out for you? 🙂

Also, what version of Spotify are you on? There was an issue with switching outputs that made Spotify crash quite the same way, but it should be sorted out now with version 1.0.99.

Let me know!

[NoMoreAngel]

Nope didn't help 😕 And I'm on Version 1.1.0.237.g378f6f25

Also as it seems if you leave the PC unsupervised while playing Spotify and it crashes, it will freeze up the whole PC after a few minutes and make a hard reset necessary.

[Saphiro]

I'm having this same exact problem, right down to my computer forcing a reset if it's left crashed for too long. Yesterday I changed my playback device so that Spotify routes through Voicemeeter banana, allowing me to play music to my stream without having to listen to it myself -- didn't notice any spotify problems yesterday, but today it's doing this, and the playback device is the only thing that changed... might just have to revert it. Idk.

[Nospoon]

Having the same issue on MacOS