Comment by tyre
5 years ago
It’s insane that Spotify on Mac doesn’t support airplay.
When my girlfriend and I moved in together, we got rid of her Alexa devices because privacy and use HomePods. But Spotify doesn’t work with AirPlay for reasons I cannot fathom, so I set her up with a program that will AirPlay specific applications on her Mac.
That said, there are open source libraries and clients for AirPlay so it shouldn’t be too difficult to get them supported. I have a Raspberry Pi for streaming to “dumb” speakers.
Airfoil [1] is worth every penny. The same could be said for pretty much everything Rogue Amoeba makes.
It’s also worth noting that Spotify can act as a remote for its own service across devices. So you can start a song playing on your phone and direct the output over AirPlay and then just interface with that session using the desktop client.
[1] https://rogueamoeba.com/airfoil/mac/
If I understood your problem correctly, you need to listen to Spotify through your HomePod which is on the same local network as your Mac.
This is what I do on macOS. I press on the little megaphone icon (enable it in OS sound preferences) in menu bar and then I can choose my HomePod from the list, without any third party software. I am running Big Sur but in two previous versions I also did the same. Maybe I’m missing something here but I think it should work seamlessly.
That routes all the audio from the mac though, not only Spotify. And with a noticeable delay.
This makes watching a "GIF" with audio (say browsing Reddit), opening a video, answering a slack call, etc. a very bad experience.
Spotify by itself supports its own protocol, whatever that may be, and chromecast. The iOS app should also support Airplay through the OS.
Personally I have a Spotify enabled receiver plugged to my audio system, it works really well.
I don’t understand, not a user of Airplay - your Mac doesn’t have a way to stream to airplay devices? Why does it come down to the app?
The Mac can use the Airplay device as an output device, but it's not ideal, because that will send ALL sound to the Airplay device.
The correct solution is for the application to support Airplay, so that for instance Spotify can stream music to your Airplay device, while the Mac sounds still goes to the speakers of the laptop/iMac.
That makes sense, thanks. I remember now I was using Tidal which did have this option.
I gave up on Spotify because of this - and because of their hostile moves to turn podcasts into another centralized service.
Apple Music is still mostly worse without discovery, but at least lossless makes up the quality difference that use to be there.