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On my Mac, I have noticed that Spotify uses quite a large cache (/Library/Caches/com.spotify.client
). In my case, it is roughly 4GB.
However, that's really puzzling because while it's true that I download all my songs, I barely own like 25 songs. The folder contains a LOT of seemingly encrypted files of 10MB or so (definitely more than 25 files!).
So my question is: why is this cache so large? Is this behavior expected from such a small library of mine?
I imagine that deleting it just clears my downloaded soundtracks - which I don't really intend to do, but I am baffled that the massive size of the cache.
Does that mean that the cache will just keep on growing indefinitely? Can it be stopped? (I'd prefer not to clear it every couple weeks) – JVon – 2018-01-12T21:36:34.700
As long as you keep listening to new songs not cached, it will keep growing. Im unsure if you are aware, but spotify also uses a P2P networking as another attempt to reduce server load, meaning the songs on your computer get served out to other spotify users. – TrevorKS – 2018-01-12T21:48:08.960
1At the end of the day, spotify client is closed source code, so we cannot change what it does. What we can do however is set a cron job to delete the directory daily, so that it would never grow very large. – TrevorKS – 2018-01-12T21:48:59.740
I actually started downloading all tracks from my playlists explicitly in order to reduce my carbon footprint (apparently all the online Internet streaming in a one-year period is equivalent to driving 70,000 cars), so if Spotify does that anyway behind the scenes then I suppose there's no need to do this. Using Wireshark can confirm though. – Jonathan Neufeld – 2019-08-05T22:47:41.083