Skip to content

Instantly share code, notes, and snippets.

@ghostbear

ghostbear/Spotify - How to reduce and limit the cache size (Windows - Mac).md

Last active May 12, 2024 23:04
Show Gist options
  • Save ghostbear/f12ee429e07ba528fb36778be5c2c88c to your computer and use it in GitHub Desktop.
Save ghostbear/f12ee429e07ba528fb36778be5c2c88c to your computer and use it in GitHub Desktop.
Download ZIP
[Spotify] How to limit the cache size (Windows/Mac OS)
Raw
Spotify - How to reduce and limit the cache size (Windows - Mac).md

Credit to MadHatter

WINDOWS

Use your text editor of choice or if you don't have one use Windows Notepad
Opening with Notepad may or may not result in a fancy mess

  1. Close Spotify
  2. Open File Explorer and paste the following into the address bar %appdata%/Spotify¤
  3. Open the file named prefs with your text editor
  4. Change the numeric value following storage.size= . If storage.size= doesn't exist add it manually to the end of the file and assign numeric value. This value represents megabytes. One gigabyte equals 1024 megabytes. In the end, it should look something like this storage.size=1024
  5. Save the file
  6. Start Spotify
  7. The cache should be reduced; not exceeding the size that you entered
  8. To verify, check the size of the Data folder in the following directory %localappdata%/Spotify

¤ For the App-Version of Spotify on Windows 10 use %localappdata%\Packages\SpotifyAB.SpotifyMusic_xxxxxxxxxxxxx\LocalState\Spotify instead of %appdata%/Spotify, credit to @SawPsyder

Mac

Apple TextEdit.app works fine to open "prefs" or one can use some similar code editing program

  1. Close Spotify
  2. Open Finder and press ⇧ + ⌘ + G or Open Spotlight (⌘ + Spacebar) and paste the following into the address bar~/Library/Application Support/Spotify
  3. Open the file named prefs with your text editor
  4. Change the numeric value following storage.size= . If storage.size= doesn't exist add it manually to the end of the file and assign numeric value. This value represents megabytes. One gigabyte equals 1024 megabytes. In the end, it should look something like this storage.size=1024
  5. Save the file (⌘ + S)
  6. Start Spotify
  7. The cache should be reduced; not exceeding the size that you entered.
  8. To verify, check the size of the Data folder in the following directory ~/Library/Caches/com.spotify.client/
@SawPsyder
Copy link

For the App-Version of Spotify on Windows 10, the file is located under: %localappdata%\Packages\SpotifyAB.SpotifyMusic_xxxxxxxxxxxxx\LocalState\Spotify

There you have to add the line storage.size=1024

@shrddr
Copy link

shrddr commented Jul 27, 2021 •
edited

This works for %localappdata%\Spotify\Data\ folder, but keeps downloading all songs from "Your library" to %localappdata%\Spotify\Storage\

@SawPsyder
Copy link

Since last month my storage usage grew to 1.32 GiB.
I did the test and set storage.size=512 and it reduced the usage to 810MiB.
So it got reduced by ~512MiB.

Meaning, it doesnt look like this setting effects all save-paths.
I checked the %localappdata%\Packages\SpotifyAB.SpotifyMusic_xxxxxxxxxxxxx folder for possible subfolders wich are now 512MiB in size and found %localappdata%\Packages\SpotifyAB.SpotifyMusic_xxxxxxxxxxxxx\LocalCache\Spotify\Data to be viable.

After setting storage.size=256 the folder %localappdata%\Packages\SpotifyAB.SpotifyMusic_xxxxxxxxxxxxx\LocalCache\Spotify\Data got reduced to ~256MiB.
But folders like %localappdata%\Packages\SpotifyAB.SpotifyMusic_xxxxxxxxxxxxx\LocalCache\Spotify\Browser were left with there original size. (In my case 174MiB - deleting this folders content doesnt seem to harm, it gets rebuild. Still dont recommend without further testing)

All in all this might mean that there is still some more work to do to really softlimit the storage usage. At least for the App-Version of Spotify

@dmwyatt
Copy link

dmwyatt commented Sep 6, 2021

Don't have a prefs file there and creating one and adding the line doesn't seem to change anything.

What I do have is a LocalPrefs.json file, but the schema doesn't seem to lend itself to adding anything about storage size:

{
    "os_crypt": {
        "encrypted_key": "A LONG STRING HERE"
    },
    "profile_network_context_service": {
        "http_cache_finch_experiment_groups": "None None None"
    }
}

@pawrequest
Copy link

what @dmwyatt said... any new solutions?

@TheMockinJay
Copy link

@dmwyatt go to the roaming spotify folder, not the local one.

@TheMockinJay
Copy link

what @dmwyatt said... any new solutions?

^

@nelitow
Copy link

nelitow commented Jun 17, 2022

To me, it reduced from 8.8Gb to 3.4. Does this file get overwritten on updates?
Worth noting:
https://community.spotify.com/t5/Live-Ideas/All-Platforms-Setting-for-max-Cache-Size-Allowance/idi-p/3474568/page/10#comments

@devnoname120
Copy link

Has anyone found a non-official solution to limit the cache size on Android?

@engwbc
Copy link

engwbc commented Dec 27, 2023 •
edited

Don't have a prefs file there and creating one and adding the line doesn't seem to change anything.

What I do have is a LocalPrefs.json file, but the schema doesn't seem to lend itself to adding anything about storage size:

{
    "os_crypt": {
        "encrypted_key": "A LONG STRING HERE"
    },
    "profile_network_context_service": {
        "http_cache_finch_experiment_groups": "None None None"
    }
}

I quickly realised that is a different file. The one you need to edit is simply prefs.file. Provided that you are on Windows, I found that it is stored in: C:\Users\user\AppData\Roaming\Spotify

Sign up for free to join this conversation on GitHub. Already have an account? Sign in to comment