Spotify songs freeze and go silent

[zack1667]

Plan

Premium

Country

United Kingdom

Device

Desktop / Web Player

Operating System

Windows 11

My Question or Issue

Hi,

Spotify is literally un-usable on my PC, for some reason when I'm playing a song it will just randomly go silent but the play bar continues to run through the time, then after a few seconds - sometimes up to 30 seconds the song audio comes back. It's really frustrating, I thought it was just the App so I un-installed and used the web player but it does the same thing on the web player. I use my PC a lot during the day for work and would love to be able to use my Spotify. This happened before I upgraded to Windows 11, it happened on 10. My internet is 300mbps and can handle most streaming services etc so it can't be that. I have tried installing new drivers deleting Spotify folders etc but nothing seems to work. Please advise if there is anything else I can troubleshoot with, it seems odd it happens on the webplayer and the App, the exact same issue. 

[zack1667]

I have also tried a different browser too. 

[Vasil]

Hey @zack1667,

Thanks for posting all of this detailed information in the Community! Let's do our best to get to the bottom of this.

Have you by any chance tried logging in your Spotify account from another machine, preferably from a different network?
Alternatively someone else can log themselves in their Spotify account from your device.
This will help us determine whether the issue is device- or account-related.

We'll be on the lookout for your response 🙂
Cheers!

[dmacfarl1]

I am having the same issue on my pc at home as well as the one at our church.  Sometimes it freezes in the middle of a song and sometimes it will play the song its on to the end and then it just stops and no clicking on play for any song in the playlist will make it work again.  The reason I got spotify was to use it on my pc so if this cannot be resolved I will need to cancel my account.  I do have the premium account.

[Maria]

Hey there @dmacfarl1,

Thanks for posting in the thread!

Just to check, are you seeing any specific error messages when playback stops? Does the same thing happen on the Web Player? 

If possible, could you ask a friend or family member to log into their own Spotify account on your device, to see if the same thing happens to them?

Let us know how you get on.

[bandedcat10]

Having the same issues as above. Both browser and app playback, the sound just stops, but the bar shows as though the song is still playing. It's certainly not my network, testing shows a response time of between 14-24ms, no packet loss, I'm on the 5Ghz band ~15ft from my wireless router, and no other applications have issues. In the browser, sometimes refreshing the page works, sometimes it doesn't, to the point where I'm not really sure refreshing the page is actually "fixing" the issue. In the app, just waiting 30 seconds to a minute will bring back the audio. I have a single friend who uses Spotify and there's no way to get him to log into his account on my device.

[bandedcat10]

Oh, interesting to note. I switched over to Pandora thinking it would work and it does the same exact thing. Youtube does it, even Bandcamp does it. I actually switched immediately from Youtube to Bandcamp in the middle of the loss of sound and the progress bar on Bandcamp showed the song was playing but there was no sound. I'm wondering if there's a common piece between streaming media services they all use that's recently been updated or something and caused a hitch. Streaming video like Netflix or Amazon Prime Video doesn't have any issues though, which is interesting, since it uses arguably more bandwidth so if it were a network issue you'd think it'd cut out as well.

[Susan_GP]

Hi there @bandedcat10,

Thanks for your reply and all the info provided.

If this happens with different music streaming apps, it's possibly device-related. First, close all other apps/processes you have running on the computer, and then try just playing music to check if the audio stops again. This will help us rule out if any other app or process is interfering with the playback. You can also try some of these recommendations given by Microsoft when there are audio issues on Windows.

On another note, go to your Spotify Account Overview page and Sign out everywhere. Then check if you experience the same behavior from the Spotify app or Web Player.

Keep us posted!