After updating to the most recent version of Ubuntu, The Natty Narwhal, Spotify decided it didn’t want to play music any longer. The only message in the UI itself was the usual “There is a problem with your sound card”, which isn’t very helpful if you want to actually try to find a solution.
Starting Spotify from the command line gave a few new messages, ending with:
E [snd:298] playbackError(12)
According to a a thread on getsatisfaction, this seems to be caused by a mismatch in different versions of the offline file cache (My naive guess is that Spotify uses the kernel identificator or some other settings about the machine in deciding the key to use for encrypting the offline storage – when this suddenly doesn’t match any longer, it refuses to play any music).
Closing Spotify, deleting the ~/.cache/spotify/offline.bnk file (~ expands to your home directory), solves the issue and allows Spotify to fill your ears yet again.
Update: This also seem to fix any issue where Spotify fails to get the external IP through upnp (at least that’s one of the error messages):
E [upnp:521] ip: error getting external ip 0 I [http:840] Result 404 Not Found
Thank you!
Cheers! This came in handy. I ended up wiping the whole cache.
Ollie