Spotify Desktop (Windows): How to downgrade so that you can actually use Spotify

Spotify recently updated to version 1.0 and with it broke a lot of features that users have come accustomed to.  Most notably for me the client freezing up and causing songs to blip.

Download 0.9.14.13 here: http://www.filehorse.com/download-spotify/17905/download/
Link warning: it will automatically download.

Install it and you will have the older version, but we need to disable the autoupdate, sadly there is no option to do this in the preferences.  Follow these instructions to disable auto-update:

Browse to %appdata%/Spotify/

If there is a Spotify_new.exe application, delete it.

Create a new text document in the same folder:

Make sure extensions are showing and rename it to Spotify_new.exe

It will ask you to set the file type to exe, which is correct, you don't want it to be a text file.

Now set Spotify_new.exe to read-only: Right click on it, click properties and check the Read-only Attribute:

You should be all set.  It feels good to be back!

A lot can be said about the state of Spotify as a company at the moment.  This is release 1.0, it should be HUGE, it should be polished and beautiful and something the company and devs and product managers be proud of.  What happened?  Between the decisions that went into 1.0 and them no longer offering some of my favorite albums lately, I am considering taking my subscription somewhere else.