Crossfade When Casting Spotify Android App to Sonos

  • 5 March 2023
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Is there an open thread somewhere for this suggestion? I know I can use crossfade on Spotify from within the Sonos app. I am wondering why it isn't possible to do this when casting/streaming from the standalone Spotify app (or any standalone app, for that matter) to Sonos. Is there a technical, legal, or other limitation? Or, is it possibly in the works? 


1 reply

The SPOTIFY App would have control of this. SONOS is simply rendering the audio stream as sent by the SPOTIFY App. In this mode, there is no beginning or end to a track as far as SONOS is concerned. If you are playing a SONOS Playlist, tracks are handled as individual items and SONOS can manage the crossfade locally.

Crossfade in general is problematic for me. If the track has some silent time baked-in at the beginning or end, a crossfade feature would need to mess with the feed. Would it be appropriate to mess with the audio and remove (variable length) silent sections?

To some extent it depends on your music preferences. Pop music typically begins and ends with a “bang” and crossfade is easy to manage. Mood music may incorporate fade-in and fade-out as part of the track.

I just started playing a SPOTIFY playlist with my SONOS controller. I enabled crossfade and in general I thought that it was a mess. This is a very mixed list of styles. One particularly ugly fade occurred between two tracks composed in different keys and tempos that clashed. Of course, some crossfades were very nice.

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