Spotify can't play this right now

[Hardnerr07]

Operating System

Two different Windows 11 systems

My Question or Issue

Spotify has been constantly breaking for me since I started using two devices to play it. I generally play music on my PC, but use my Laptop to control the music playing. Most of the time, when I try to play for the first time during the day, or when I switch playlists, Spotify will break on either my Laptop or my PC, stopping playing, showing "Spotify can't play this right now" and generally making the other device disappear from the available devices as well. If I close the app then, it won't be able to start, saying "Spotify application is not responding", and I have to close all of the Spotify processes in the Task Manager (the application itself seems to close, but it leaves processes running). Looks like waiting a bit also fixes the issue, I had the "Spotify can't play this right now" error, but after a minute or two the music started playing again.

The devices are not switching networks or losing connection to the internet, it seems to be Spotify only issue.

[AlejaR]

Hey @Hardnerr07,

Thanks for posting in the Community and welcome. 

In this case, if you haven't yet, we recommend you do a clean reinstall of the Spotify app on both your computers. By doing that, the app can be up-to-date and you can make sure the cache is not leading to this inconvenience. You can see the steps for a clean reinstall here.

If the above doesn't do the trick, we'd like to check: do you use a VPN on one of your computers or both? If yes, we'd recommend switching it off to see if you notice any difference. Additionally, do you notice if this is happening when trying to use the web player on your laptop to control the music? If not sure, it'd be helpful if you checked.

Lastly, we'd like to gather some additional info. Since you mentioned this started to happen when you started to use 2 different devices to control the playback, has the app always been behaving like this or does it start to happen after a specific event such as an OS update?  If yes, please send us the details along with the Spotify version you're running in both. 

Keep us in the loop!

[Hardnerr07]

Interestingly enough, after days (or weeks?) of the issue, the problem stopped happening. Since the day I made the post I was unable to replicate the issue.

I can't exactly tell what made the issue start, or end. As far as I can tell, I did not update Spotify or my system, but the issue has not occured again yet.

While the issue persisted, I did not get the chance to test the web player, nor did I try to use my phone either.

I did reinstall Spotify on one of the devices (the device being controled) but it didn't help. I did not get to reinstall it on the controlling PC.

Regarding VPNs, I do have VPNs installed but I rarely use those, and they were not ran during the time I had the issue.

Not sure if there's any chance the issue was related to something on Spotify's server side, otherwise it fixed itself without me doing anything that I'm aware of.

I'm still monitoring to see if the issue reappears, but so far I have not seen as much as a hint of it.

Thanks for your time!