Spotify broken by Wireshark on Linux

VPN
1

Hi, I’ve been annoyed by the Spotify client on my Linux Mint machine that somehow detects my PIA VPN. It shows “error 4” and says it has no connection to the internet.

So I installed Wireshark to see what’s going on. When I started capturing, Spotify showed the error 4 again and refused to cooperate. I gave up and uninstalled Wireshark, but Spotify still won’t return to the previous working state.

I removed all related packages, all related files I could find, reinstalled Spotify, deleted Spotify configs, restarted the PC, but Spotify still thinks I’m doing something fishy.

I’m giving up trying to make Spotify work with my VPN, but I would at least like to be able to use Spotify in any way and I am not able to.

Is there anything else I should try to remove this Wireshark “curse”?

The only way I got Spotify to work is removing the apt package and installing Spotify via Snap, but I’d rather not use Snap at all.

2

Try clearing this folder (~/.cache/spotify/) of files. It assisted another user with a similar issue. Solved: No internet detected - Error code 4 (Linux) - The Spotify Community

Have you tried using the “apt purge” rather than “apt remove”? There could be some leftover bad configuration files.

3

It works! Still no idea how to make it work with a VPN, but at least I got it back to the original state. Thank you!

4

My theory would be Spotify has location-based content and is blocking VPNs as best as it can; similar to Netflix.

5

I think so, but I can’t justify not using a vpn just to be able to listen to music. I tried to set up split tunneling for Spotify, so it can bypass the vpn, but that didn’t work either, still got detected. Strange is that the Snap version works just ok with the vpn.