[pkscout]

Thanks for offering your help with this issue, I've just learnt how to enable debug logging and have captured a log for you, so the skipping audio with AS + Spotimc problem can further be investigated (if it even is related to AS at all). I'm not sure if you've read the full discussion on the issue, but the gist is Spoticmc will begin repeatedly pausing and skipping commencing from the second song in any playlist if AS is also enabled, but the first song will always plays fine. If I disable AS no more skipping in Spotimc.

Here are my notes for each notable event that took place and should correspond to the debug log:
1) ~21:13:00 Boot into xbmc (xbmcbuntu) to begin debug log session.
2) ~21:15:15 Begin playing first song in Spotimc
3) ~21:16:15 I press TAB on keyboard to start artist slideshow visualisation
4) ~21:18:00 Artist info and slideshow images begin to populate the screen
5) ~21:19:10 First song ends and next song automatically starts playing.
6) ~21:19:20 Second song begins to repeatedly pause and play for 5 seconds each over and over.
7) ~21:21:00 I stop the song playback here, at which point it had still been repeatedly pausing and playing every 5 or so seconds each.
8) ~21:21:10 I exit out of Spotimc

I think this is going to be my day of offering nothing helpful.

I looked through the debug log, and whatever issue is causing the playback to hickup is keeping AS from even logging anything that it is doing (which leads me to believe it isn't able to do anything). I do see a JSON call where AS is asking for the artist and MusicBrainz ID of the currently playing artist, but after that nothing until the next JSON request. I can tell that's the AS JSON request because of the data it asks for. So the only thing I can figure is that for some reason making the JSON request of XBMC somehow disrupts the Spotify stream in a way that causes the pausing. I can only assume it is not happening on the first song because the stream got started before AS was invoked. I guess on the second song there is some contention between the JSON call for the currently playing information and something else.

The bottom line here is that there likely isn't anything I can do to fix this, as the JSON call is absolutely critical to how AS functions.