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Comment by birdman3131 | Hacker News Reader

What sells me on spotify is the ability to control it from any device. Listening on my phone while at my computer? Hit skip on my keyboard and the phone skips to the next track. Playing on my Dot? I can pause right from my phone. Ditto with volume control.

I wanted to like amazon music but I could not because of the lack of these features.

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Different story for me. I listen to desktop spotify while at work regularly. Every time I lock my computer to go have lunch and want to listen to spotify on my car, there is the dreaded "Listen on this device option" which will randomly appear either right when I start playing on my phone or 5 minutes later when I'm already driving and my phone is locked, which stops the current playing music.

Also, if I choose to listen on the new device, it starts playing whatever was playing on the last device, which usually is not what I want since I have different offline lists on different devices. If I'm already playing something on the device, don't ask me to listen to what was on the other device, honor my latest input please.

Exactly. I wish I could make all this shared context disappear and make it act dumber. I find myself fighting the way it works all the time :(

I don't have that problem. It might be because you leave the music playing on your desktop?

What killed Amazon Music for me was:

1) Terrible playlists curated by people (most likely using popularity data) that didn't know anything about the genres or how they should flow.

2) Family Sharing that let family members use my credit card to order stuff.

For a while I worked at building my own playlists on Amazon Music, but the straw that broke the camel's back was a relative inadvertently ordering a cat tree on my dime.

Did you set this up manually? I'm not using Spotify but this sounds rather confusing. Is it at least smart enough to recognize when there's something else playing on your computer and send the skip command to that app instead of your phone if you hit the skip key?

It knows which device is currently playing. Anything you do sends it to the currently playing device. You can pull up a list of all connected devices and select which one you want to be playing. It then starts on the new device from where the old one left off.

It works really well. I have my raspberry pi plugged into my amplifier, and play through that. I control it with my phone or laptop, whichever is nearer.

I think the question is about the media keys. What happens if your phone is playing something on Spotify, and your laptop is playing something on VLC, but also has Spotify open? Does pressing the skip media key make both players skip, or just one of them?

Ah interesting question.

This thread implies that there can be a war between apps fighting for control

https://community.spotify.com/t5/Desktop-Windows/Media-keys-....

I've never really used the media keys, so have no idea how it really works in practice. Might have a play when I get home later.

I think the media key interuption dispatching is handled by the OS and not the apps

As other replies pointed out, this is handled by the OS. Seems to work well most of the time for me on Ubuntu.

On Windows VLC will swallow hot keys if it's on top, otherwise they are caught by spotify. If they are both in the background it's spotify. If there's another app that listens to the same hot keys, I think (pretty confident) that it's the last one to register for the hot key.

On Windows hold shift then press the media keys to control a second (background) program. Found this out purely by accident in this exact scenario, VLC in foreground and Spotify in background!!!

Yeah it's actually really handy. I can send spotify to my chromecast from my phone, and as long as I have spotify open on my laptop, I can use the media keys to pause or skip.

You can only listen on one device at a time so this never hapoens. All devices states are synced and one of them is playing

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