Windows playback stuttering

[sch5vd]

Plan

Premium

Country

USA

Device

Windows 10 PC

Operating System

Windows 10 Professional OEM

My Question or Issue

Playback on the Windows desktop application stutters about every 10 seconds. Just a very slight hitch but 100% noticeable and makes it IMPOSSIBLE to listen to music.

No, this does not happen on any other devices.

Yes, I did a clean install.

Yes, I turned off hardware acceleration.

No, it's not my device. I am running a Focusrite Clarett 8pre thunderbolt interface over thunderbolt 2. This is a PC I have built specifically for making music. I run DAW sessions with high DSP loads at low latency all the time. LatencyMon is green across the board. 

No, it's not my Internet connection. I have Fios gigabit. 

What gives?

[Eni]

Hey there @sch5vd, 

Thanks for getting in touch about this and welcome to the Community! 

Just to confirm, has this always happened or it started happening after a specific event such as an update either of Spotify or the OS of your PC? Also, could you check if the same happens on the web player? 

On another note, thanks for letting us know all the troubleshooting steps you've tried so far. We can add a few others to see if they work for you:

        1. Click on your profile picture at the top right corner and select Settings.

        2. Scroll down to Proxy Settings and change the Proxy type to No proxy.

        3. Restart the app.

If the issue persists, we'd recommend clearing up your hosts file, since it might cause issues if corrupted.

Let us know how it goes.

[sch5vd · Accepted solution]

I appreciate your response, just adding a final reply here to anyone who finds this topic:

It was my device. 😑 I am a clown for this one, yes. Although I was not having any issues when using my audio interface as an ASIO device, I found that other windows applications (Foobar and other non-DAW music players) were having the same issue as I originally posted about. 

I updated my Focusrite drivers (which I don't like to do, as getting a stable setup with Thunderbolt on Windows has been tricky in the past), and that fixed it. No idea what caused the change, as before my original post everything had been working fine. 

Full info for anyone else trying to troubleshoot a similar issue:

PC is a custom build with an ASRock Z370 chipset, Intel i7 9700k. Using an Apple thunderbolt 3 to 2 adapter with a Focusrite Clarett 8pre. Focusrite control version before updating was 2.something - current is 3.18.0. Current (working) drivers v4.119.13, Clarett firmware v1021.   

[Ivelina]

Hey again @sch5vd,

Thanks for getting back to us and it's great to hear that things are now looking good on your end 🙂

We appreciate you sharing your steps in this thread so that other users can see them and try the same if needed.

Should you need help with anything else or if you've got any questions, the Community's here!