1

I have two applications that run through Wine that will sometimes get horribly distorted and "sped forward" (I can see in Spotify that the files are played back much faster than they should be). I tested it today and was able to play music in Spotify for a while, perhaps 15 minutes. I also tried to test audio in Wine and that seemed fine, too. I started the other application and the sound was fine there too, for the most part: it was a little choppy sometimes which seemed to correlate with how rapidly I changed between audio tracks. In Spotify, though the sound was mostly fine, there was some small hiccups with the playback sometimes, but I don't know if that is a symptom of the overarching problem with Wine.

After a while Spotify began to ouput audio that was distorted and sped-forward. It was pretty consistent; sometimes it would return to normal, but for the most part it was just useless. The other application and wine-config audio testoutputted horrible audio, too.

Driver used: winealsa.drv.

Improve this question
4
  • You don't need to play Spotify via wine. You could try the browser based interface, which is available for free and paid accounts. Alternatively, there is a preview native client available for Spotify, although it hasn't been updated in a while.
    – user76204
    Mar 26, 2013 at 0:09
  • ^ I didn't know that there was a browser alternative, thanks.
    – Guildenstern
    Mar 30, 2013 at 15:22
  • I've done a quick answer discussing alternatives to using wine; if you still want to use wine we can try to debug it.
    – user76204
    Mar 31, 2013 at 0:19
  • This sounds like the bug when you upgrade wine but have an old wine config which tells it to use the old broken drivers.
    – Alistair Buxton
    Mar 31, 2013 at 3:40

1 Answer 1

Reset to default
2

Please Note: In the comments above I suggested alternatives to using wine to run Spotify, so that audio problems could be avoided. The OP was pleased by these comments and so here's a quick answer in case it is of use to anyone else as well. When alternatives to using wine exist (as they do in another context with Steam on Linux), it seems reasonable to discuss them instead of spending hours debugging wine.

There are two main alternatives to using Spotify in wine:

  • The Spotify Preview for Linux client
  • The platform independent beta browser based solution (flash required)

How to install the client has been discussed elsewhere and on this site, so I thought I would briefly mention the in-browser solution for Spotify. It seems to support both free and paid accounts, and even though it is technically in beta, anyone with a Spotify account can use it. It obviously requires the flashplugin installed, so a browser such as firefox or google-chrome are ideal. The streaming quality seems to be fine and the audio issue free, unlike sometimes the situation in wine. It does, however, obviously depend on the quality of your network connection.

For more information I should read these OMGUbuntu spotify articles, which discuss in depth the alternatives available, and how to install the client if you want to compare both means of using Spotify. It is only surmise, but Spotify seem to be directing more resources to Spotify in browser than their clients (the Linux based one hasn't been updated for a while). This is probably because the browser version is platform independent and the obvious move for a cloud service (particularly in view of the rise of other Google alternatives,etc.).

Here's a screenshot from the browser version of Spotify.

enter image description here

Improve this answer

You must log in to answer this question.

Not the answer you're looking for? Browse other questions tagged .