Today we’re going to talk about music.
My living room speakers are connected to a mixer that combines output from my projector, DJ set, laptop dock & a Windows VM running on my server. This means I don’t have to specify an input when switching audio sources, it’s great.
The Windows VM has a GPU, USB PCIe card & Audio Interface passed through, so it’s as functional as a normal desktop.
Okay, so what’s so special about this? I recently switched to Spotify and there was one feature I was not aware of but I had been looking everywhere for (apparently not enough), SPOTIFY CONNECT!
I can use my phone to control audio on that Windows VM, meaning I could hop on the phone or play a voice note without interrupting the music- similar to the Chromecast Audio, rest in peace. B.S. (before Spotify) I only was able to control the music directly from Windows, which kinda sucked if I was over in the Kitchen, or lose the ability to keep music playing while on the phone.
So we’ve addressed the living room, all is great there. Now what about the bedroom? My server’s audio interface has a second output hooked up to bookshelf speakers in my bedroom meaning two audio outputs show up in Windows. That’s cool but I’m not going to interact with Windows every time I want to change outputs. Now, wouldn’t it be great if we could change the audio output device on Windows by executing an SSH command via the iOS Shortcuts App? Yes I’m sure that’s exactly what you were thinking.
nircmd setdefaultsounddevice Bedroom
nircmd setdefaultsounddevice LivingRoom
Where does this leave us now? I can have Spotify play music on Windows from my phone, and either ask Siri to choose between my Living Room Speakers & Bedroom Speakers, or tap on widgets I linked to the shortcuts.
Next problem: Spotify can’t control the sleep timer on the desktop client via Connect, sooo I wrote a script that I can also run from my phone to recreate the feature.
Happy Sunday!