Spotify is a great application that lets you listen to any music they have (there’s an incredible amount on there) with the odd, almost unnoticable, advert thrown in to pay for the service. It works on windows or mac, but there is no native binaries for linux. Thankfully spotify for windows works under wine just fine - hooray.

However I found that the audio wasn’t great - for me it would skip like a CD skips every few seconds - if it was a CD I would just clean it and throw it in the bin. The reason for this behaviour is found in wine’s audio config - I won’t go into the real reason why, but it is to do with the driver and daemon, etc. Other people have had problems with distortion or just no audio at all.

The solution if you have this problem is to start all your wine commands with padsp and make sure the OSS audio driver is selected. First start winecfg like this:

padsp winecfg

Then go to Audio, find the OSS driver and select that (and unselect anything else selected), hit OK, etc.. Now start your wine apps (inc spotify) like this:

padsp wine "C:\Program Files\Spotify\spotify.exe"

And now my spotify is working just fine!

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