Why is Spotify not implementing this? | Hacker News Reader

Why is Spotify not implementing this?

community.spotify.com

9 pointsquicon14 comments

Spotify invests most of their dev time into finding more ways to advertise, interrupt, and be annoying to their free and paid users. There's little innovation going on there. Like Hulu/Disney+,Netflix - Spotify makes piracy fun again.

The difficulty is in having precise playback time. If you're a few dozen milliseconds off the music will be terrible.

Perhaps make it so every phone/computer device with spotify connected can control its one set of speakers either cabled or bluetooth. User selects "Group Speakers". It plays a fun tone where the app listens for the delay between the audio going out and the audio being received, finding the playback latency. Now that the devices know their playback latency they can communicate and play at the same time. As users do this with things like bluetooth speakers you collect that data and make it automatic for future speakers of that type. If it's out of sync just have a "sync" button to do it manually. People will figure it out.

I think Sonos still has a patent on this. Perhaps this: https://patents.google.com/patent/US9202509B2/en

I would side with this.

Recently was looking for same feature (multi-room audio) and ended up buying IKEA SYMFONISK (basically sonos) speakers, that function without an issue. Only extra step is going to Sonos app to merge them and Spotify picks them up as one device , no questions asked. So technically it should be rather easy, no latency issues at all.

This is something I've also wanted, but not understanding the technical challenges to implement it I really don't know if it's feasible for Spotify to take on. Similar solutions I've seen to this have been fully contained within one hardware product line. Like some bluetooth speakers of the same manufacturer can interconnect and play the same audio together, or things like amazon alexa.

I'm curious about the real reason they are not able to prioritize the 5th most voted idea. Seems easy to do, and it would convert Spotify into a home music system. While I don't know much about computers I suspect its because they are not sure they could stop some users from using this to share the account outside their home. Otherwise, I can not think of any other reason.

Patents? Not enough control over latency?

probably due to licensing to music labels ...

I would definitely say it's the latency issue. If the speakers are within earshot of each other, the timing differences is likely to make it a bad experience more often than not. If you really want this feature, get a house-speaker system that supports it and have Spotify stream to that _one_.

I a bunch of Denon devices from smart speakers to a soundbar to two home theater receivers and many of them support HEOS which can do whole home streaming.

It sucks that you have to control it with a mobile app (I did write a PC app using Tk but that is not much better than a mobile app!). Also I have had a lot of devices fail either completely or partially (WiFi just went on my 7.1 receiver the other day, the same receiver is relegated to a (awesome) stereo because the HDMI port). The 5.1 receiver was a decontented ‘pandemic special’ with no HEOS.

But that said, the whole home audio is great and works with my jellyfin and Amazon Music and TuneIn and presumably spotify.

To me, it doesn't seem easy to do at all. How do you stop different speakers from being slightly out of sync with each other?

It sounds like they want the same streaming music to play out of multiple devices in the same place at once. This is a very difficult synchronization problem, especially within a heterogenous device space. The user experience if they fail to really nail it would be very poor, and the potential benefit is not that big.

I'm not clear on the question being asked. I currently am signed in with my Spotify account on Alexa, my phone and my tablet. I can stream the same music from all four Alexa devices in the house, and also concurrently on my phone and tablet. I don't normally want all these devices playing (at home I just need the Alexa devices to be playing), and I actually have more issues where music is playing from more devices than I want.

My Alexa devices are scattered about the house, so I'm not interested in stereo separation in a single room - maybe they are talking about the timing required for that.

What's the best open source software stack that can turn a bunch of internet-connected devices (like Pis) with audio devices into a single home audio device available via Chromecast / Miracast / DLNA?

https://github.com/badaix/snapcast!

Works perfectly on pis scattered around the house.

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