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Comment by jfrunyon | Hacker News Reader

I'd be willing to pay for a Spotify client that allows you to select your audio output device. And yet here we are, 10 years later...

Spotify is a marketing platform first and an audio player second.

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If you’re on Windows, you can define audio input and output devices on a per app basis through Windows’ settings. Handy for any app that doesn’t support such configuration (though Spotify obviously should.)

It works similar on Linux with pipewire/alsa/pulse, there are several guis for such.

TIL, thanks!

I'd rather use https://staticz.com/soundcontrol/ (which I do use actually) than rely on an app like Spotify to be honest.

This. I absolutely hate it when apps try to be smart and use their own audio routing.

I'm a Linux user and have multiple audio outputs. I've configured Spotify to always go to my amp / speakers. And it works great.

But then there's Teams, which is absolute sh*tshow. It always says "custom configuration" but you never know where it goes, and partially ignores the configuration in PulseAudio / PipeWire.

I understand why they do this, random users may find it more useful to have this choice directly in front of them, and I would agree... if it worked well! Zoom at least has the good taste to have an entry for "use system settings", which seems to mostly work.

I think that aside from "specialty" applications (like DAWs, etc) regular apps have no business messing around with the system audio settings.

> I think that aside from "specialty" applications (like DAWs, etc)

Or... like audio players, maybe?

And it's not messing around with the system audio settings; it's selecting a audio device other than the system-wide default.

What platform do you mean? The iOS app lets me select output device. It’s a little icon next to play/pause, kind of half computer screen half bookshelf speaker (monitor/monitor :)

I think I remember seeing this on desktop too but at that point why not use the OS sound mixer?

Android works pretty much the same way. I'm usually listening on my PC, but I don't try to control other devices from there so I can't remember if it's possible there.

this doesn't speak to that point but while we're talking android, the Spotify lite client is so nice for me and my 6 year old phone

No, the app lets you select what system you're going to listen to Spotify on, not what audio device to use on your system.

Sometimes I just want music through my speakers while I have something else piping into my headset. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Can't you just do that outside of Spotify? It would be nicer if you could in app, but with pavucontrol I have Spotify send music where it belongs.

They make it easy to play to any Bluetooth device or headphones. Covers my use case, but I can see it being annoying if it doesn’t support your setup.

On iphone I can’t seem to actually choose the bluetooth device to play to from the app itself. iOS limitation?

Click the Bluetooth or Devices icon, then choose “AirPlay or Bluetooth” under “Other Devices”.

For me this presents a native popover showing all Bluetooth devices and Apple TV.

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