Sorry, audiophiles — Spotify is crashing when playback quality is set to lossless

Spotify outages happen almost as regularly as New Music Friday, and now we’ve got a fresh issue to deal with. This time, Spotify users have been crashing out over the desktop version of the app, well, crashing out when they went to play some of their favorite songs with the media quality set to “lossless.” Spotify said it is working on the problem, which is now on its second day.

Early this morning, a Spotify staff member posted on the Spotify Community Forum, “We’ve received reports that the app frequently crashes during playback when the audio quality is set to ‘Lossless’. This occurs mainly on desktop.”

The forum is filled with a few dozen complaints. Most users said they were using Windows, though one said that it happened to them with Linux. Mac users might not be affected, as one user said that while they had the issue on their Windows machine, they did not have it on their Mac.

Spotify users narrowed the blame to the lossless setting by looking at crash logs and having success in playing tracks when they adjusted their audio quality settings from “lossless” to “very good.”

None of the usual tricks to clear a software issue seem to have worked, with many saying they have tried refreshing, reinstalling, and turning off hardware acceleration to little avail. The only thing that worked for one person was the laborious process of starting playback on their phone and then transferring it to their computer on a track-by-track basis.

The problem does not seem to be persistent across tracks, leading some to post exactly what they were listening to when the app crashed. The list serves as a sort of soundtrack to the issue.

Spotify introduced the lossless setting for Spotify Premium members in September of last year. It streams audio up to 24-bit/44.1 kHz in the FLAC format. Previously the highest audio quality available on Spotify was “Very High,” which uses a lossy Ogg Vorbis/AAC format capped at 320 kbps.