How to clear, change or move the Spotify cache

Martin Brinkmann
Sep 17, 2013
Music, Music and Video
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Spotify is a popular music streaming service that is available as a free and premium service for most operating systems. The service uses a cache on the host system which can fill up rather quickly, depending on how actively the service is being used.

While that may not be an issue for most users, it may be for some, as the service uses up to 10% of the free disk space of the primary hard drive for caching. It can grow quite large because of that. If you have 20 Gigabytes of free space, the cache may take up to 2 Gigabyte, if you have 200 Gigabytes free, it may take up to 20 Gigabytes and so on.

If you have noticed that disk space has gone down after you have started to use Spotify, you may want to either modify the caching preferences of the service to reduce the amount of disk space reserved for the service, or clear the disk cache regularly to free it up.

Note: The Spotify cache stores all offline tracks. If you use the feature, you may want to avoid clearing it completely.

Change the Spotify cache size

To change the size of the cache do the following:

  1. Open the Spotify client on your system. This example uses the Windows client.
  2. Click on Edit > Preferences or use the Ctrl-P shortcut to open the program options.
  3. Scroll all the way down until you find the cache entry here.

You have two options when it comes to the size of the cache. You can set it dynamically to a maximum of 10% of the free disk space, or select a fixed maximum size for it instead. To do so, switch to the "use at most" option and use the slider to set a fixed max cache size. This size can be between 1 and 100 Gigabytes.

A 1 Gigabyte cache can store about 200 songs. If it runs out of space, the least played songs will be automatically removed and replaced with new tracks.

Move the Spotify cache

You can use the same menu for that. All you have to do is click on the browse button and select a different location for the cache.

This can be useful if your main hard drive or partition is running out of space. Just move the cache to another drive and you are all set.

Note that the existing cache will be moved to the new location automatically so that you do not lose access to any offline tracks.

Clear the Spotify cache

Deleting the cache to free up disk space is another thing that you may want to consider, especially if you do not save songs for offline listening.

All you have to do is clear the contents of the Spotify "Storage" folder. The default location on Windows Vista or newer is C:\Users\Martin\AppData\Local\Spotify\Storage\

You can look up the location in the caching preferences. Just delete all files and folders inside storage.

Please note that you need to close Spotify to clear all cached files and folders.

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Comments

  1. Justin said on November 30, 2011 at 10:18 am
    Reply

    The warning message about AAC streams when you load streams is because you don’t have the free Orban AAC/aacPlus Player Plugin installed.

    http://codecpack.co/download/Orban-aacPlus-Player-Plugin.html

    1. Martin Brinkmann said on November 30, 2011 at 10:56 am
      Reply

      Justin, thanks for the information.

  2. santosh said on December 1, 2011 at 12:43 am
    Reply

    does this support AAC ? or only mp3 streaming

    1. Martin Brinkmann said on December 1, 2011 at 1:43 am
      Reply

      I’d say it supports all pls streams but I have not tried that so cannot verify it 100%.

  3. Barnabas said on August 3, 2012 at 5:15 pm
    Reply

    Thank you Martin for a most informative and viable solution (it allowed me to play streams from a Netherland internet radio station in my WMP)! Continued success to you!

    Barnabas (USA)

  4. AppleRome said on October 7, 2012 at 7:31 am
    Reply

    Your steps’ recommendation is still valid until 7th October 2012.. Thank you very much !!

  5. Laura said on December 1, 2012 at 4:41 pm
    Reply

    Thank you!

  6. sak2005 said on December 9, 2014 at 8:03 pm
    Reply

    You must convert file.pls to file.m3u
    because file.pls open with winamp and file.m3u open with wmp.

  7. Lithium said on February 10, 2017 at 11:10 am
    Reply

    Hi
    2017 still kicking on Windows 7
    Thx a ton

  8. Dennis said on April 18, 2017 at 4:05 am
    Reply

    Hey, even i can do it, i stumbled through it and it works great! The only instruction advice i will add as i had to figure this out, when the wmp box opens that says save or open the bar on right says wmp click that drop down and select “open pls in wmp” once you do that it will work . Took me quite some time to discover that as i am no computer expert by any means. Having said that, previously i had downloaded codec packages and something about aac. None did any good. This rocks, i listen to a lot of internet radio and a number of them have dropped flash player and getting wmp to work had been a nightmare. So many thanks for this great solution to another problem that Micro-Hell will not even address. Peace- Out

  9. stephen marshall said on March 19, 2019 at 2:07 am
    Reply

    openplsinwmp came in a zip file. I unpacked it, and didn’t find anything that looks like an executable, and even the files in the “doc” folder were in a format windows didn’t recognize. I’m not stupid. you said it would open effortlessly. It didn’t. This a rabbit hole I don’t want to go down.

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