If your Spotify desktop app keeps shutting down mid-song, the culprit is probably your audio settings.
A bug inside the desktop player is triggering immediate crashes for listeners who stream their music with playback quality dialed up to lossless. The problem has stretched into its second day, turning one of the platform's most anticipated audio upgrades into an exercise in frustration.
Spotify acknowledged the issue publicly after reports piled up from listeners unable to get through a track. In a post published on the Spotify Community Forum, an employee confirmed the streaming service is actively investigating the breakdown.
"We’ve received reports that the app frequently crashes during playback when the audio quality is set to ‘Lossless’," the staff member wrote. "This occurs mainly on desktop."
For now, the disruption appears largely confined to personal computers, sparing mobile listeners from the same crash loop. But for desktop users who hooked up decent DACs or studio monitors to take advantage of uncompressed streams, the app simply closes down instead of playing.
The Quick Fix
Spotify says it is currently working on an official fix. Until an update rolls out, affected users do not have many options besides turning the fidelity down.
The current workaround requires opening the app settings and lowering the streaming quality to "very high" — or whatever tier sits just below lossless on your machine. Changing that preference stops the playback engine from choking, letting the player run normally without killing the process.
It is an irritating compromise for anyone paying attention to bitrates, yet it beats an unresponsive client that refuses to play sound. Desktop crashes have cropped up sporadically during past rollout phases, but having an app fall over simply by selecting an official fidelity tier is a messy look for the company.
Spotify has not provided a specific timeline for when a patch will arrive on Windows or macOS. The company's forum team stated only that engineers are investigating the reports, meaning listeners will need to sit tight on compressed audio streams until an update lands.
SDFiled by The Software Desk
Apps, platforms, operating system releases, security fixes and the features arriving in them.
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