Making AirPlay sing
AirPlay is the hardest thing Spades Audio does, and we’re not done with it. Tell us about your speakers.
Sending one app to a HomePod while the rest plays on your Mac sounds simple. Underneath, it’s a juggling act: speakers that report their own delay, not always truthfully, clocks that slowly drift apart, and devices that wake up, change address or join a group after Spades has started.
A good share of the releases since the public beta have been about exactly that. AirPlay now routes on the first click. Speakers in a group stay in step, the crackle after a busy moment clears in milliseconds, and speakers reconnect after they change address. A HomePod switched on after launch shows up instead of going unnoticed, and an equaliser on AirPlay is something you can actually hear.
There’s more to do. Every home is wired a little differently, with its own mix of HomePods, Apple TVs, AirPlay speakers, receivers and Bluetooth, and the combinations we haven’t met yet are the ones that teach us most.
So tell us about yours: which speakers, how you group them, and anything that sounds off. Write to hello@happymachines.company, or report it on GitHub. Every fix so far is in the release notes.