Spotify Connect is not reliable in detecting local clients

[joriswitteman]

Plan Premium

Country Netherlands

Device

MacBook Pro Late 2016, Mac Mini 2012, iPhone 12 mini

Operating System

macOS 11.5, macOS 10.15.7, iOS 14.7

My Question or Issue

As a Spotify Connect user, I feel like your product is plain broken, and has been for years.

Here’s a video if how bad Spotify Connect works.

https://jor.is/spotify-connect.mov

On the left, is Spotify on my MacBook Pro. On the right, is a Remote Desktop connection to my Mac Mini. Same house, same WiFi. As you can see, Spotify fails to see the other device, until the device actually starts playing. The same happens between my Macs and iPhone.

Also notice that the mac mini does not see that the MacBook Pro is playing. But the MacBook Pro does pick up when the Mac Mini starts playing. Both machines are fully connected and running the latest version of Spotify. The MacBook runs macOS 11.5. The Mini runs 10.15.7.

[joriswitteman]

Perhaps related is that my Mac Mini, who is usually the target of my Spotify Connect actions, is on the same home network, but wired rather than wireless.

I guess what puzzles me most is why these things don't just consult eachother over the Internet, via Spotify's servers, without the local network having anything to do with it. The fact that the MacBook sees when the Mac Mini starts playing, proves that connectivity is possible in my current setup.

[Elena]

Hey @joriswitteman,

Thanks for reporting this on the Community.

Currently the desktop client may not appear in the Connect picker if the computer has two network connections, e.g. Ethernet and Wi-Fi and our teams are working on improving this behavior. 

The feedback you're providing is helpful in the investigation and we appreciate it highly - thanks for the time you've taken to describe this! We're always aiming to improve our features so we hope you find it gets better in the future. 

Let us know if we can help with anything else.