Moderator comment: Split out from: Apple Music integration (with new Apple Music Web-API?)
Right. But so is Spotify. Spotify Connect is a brilliant idea and I cannot understand why Apple would not implement it. When Airplay 2 came out, I thought that was part of the implementation.
The only reason I can think of that would make Apple reticent to have such a method is multi-room playback: Airplay 2 can multi-room to any set of speakers of any brand combinations. Spotify Connect cannot do that in the general case - works with Sonos but there’s a fair amount of meshing happening on the Sonos side.
Spotify Connect has one major drawback - it works over the internet, not the local network. This scenario happened to us - people housesitting for a week were using Spotify on our hi-fi (Hegel amp has Spotify Connect). Couple of days later, I’m sitting in the house, amp is on but not playing music. All of a sudden music blasts out the speakers, and volume ramps up to max. Fortunately managed to turn volume down - happens again, so switched it off. Fortunately no speaker damage. This is housesitter trying to use Spotify at their house, which is looking to play on last used device - our amp. The only solution is for the account holder to log out of all devices on their account homepage. This is a well-known issue that Spotify refuses to do anything about. Not cool.
Spotify killed the speakers of one guy on the Naim forum with that. My hifi dealer has long banned Spotify because it’s uncontrollable. The Spotify guys think it’s a feature because users can control their Spotify even if they are too dumb to log into the right network
So does Roon. If your internet goes down so will Roon eventually. And frankly, although I have terabytes of local music, when it comes to Apple Music, I basically stream.
My only means of playing local files currently, when the internet is down, is via UPnP/dCS Mosaic.
So does Roon what? The Spotify complaints in previous posts were about the fact that the Spotify app can control a Spotify device from any network, if it was ever connected to this device. It doesn’t have to be on the same network. And so can everyone else who ever had their Spotify app connected to your device.
Of course you need to be on some network, but it doesn’t matter which one. It works over the Internet across Spotify’s servers. So if, say, some friend visits and is on your wifi and then connects their Spotify app to your Spotify device, they can still control it after they are back home or in any other network.
My dealer had their players do random things because customers wanted to use their own Spotify app with their own playlists and so on, so logged into the store’s customer wifi and connected to the players. But then that connection remained forever after they left.
Wouldn’t that assume they can control the volume of someone else’s amp or receiver ? When I was over at my daughters I couldn’t control the volume.
That was what happened in my case - volume kept increasing to max because Spotify user couldn’t hear anything on their phone so kept turning volume up and down. Guess it depends how volume control is set up on devices.
(Apple Shortcut playing a shuffled 8000+ track Baroque playlist at the correct volume on my KEF LS50 Wireless II speakers each morning – activated via an Apple Watch complication or with my phone by tapping the NFC tag conveniently stuck to the coffee machine… ;-)).
You can turn it off in app so it will only play to devices on local network. I make sure I set this on their devices before they use my systems at all. Doesn’t stop them turning it on but it’s not needed for regular playback nor do they know where to look for it usually.
Right, but this is an app/account setting. If someone else plays to my Spotify Connect speaker via their account, they would have had to turn “only local” on their app, no?
Yeah but the setting is in their app. It would seem reasonable to be able to control this for my player and kick out access for other app instances / restrict it to local LAN, but Spotify doesn’t want that.
Of course, if one is aware of the thing, one can do it like @CrystalGipsy and change the setting on their device, but clearly not everyone is aware or in certain settings it might not be feasible
