Spotify WiiM + Spotify Premium Family + Alexa in large home

[bjkramer]

(apologies for the length)

I’m starting a renovation project on a very large home that has 17 (!) separate rooms with ceiling speakers. We’re not going to use a fancy home automation system (Control4, etc), the client only wants systems that a tech-savvy family member can reasonably diagnose/modify.

I have previously used Sonos devices in projects like this. However, I am curious about using WiiM devices (presumably the Amp Pro or MOD A80) instead of Sonos, but Sonos+Spotify can do something important that I don’t know if WiiM can do…

The client has a Spotify Premium Family account. Sonos is able to use this one account, logged in with only one user name, and play multiple different streams to different rooms simultaneously; we’ve tested that with the 5 zones in their current home, and it worked perfectly. This ability is a critical feature for them.

Another important feature is how WiiM reacts to voice control, specifically with Alexa, and this is where Sonos falls short. When using the Sonos app we can play different streams to different rooms simultaneously with one account, as I mentioned, but that doesn’t work if I ask Alexa to play music instead of using the app. When I ask Alexa to play a song it plays the first stream just fine, but when I tell Alexa to start a different Spotify stream to a different room, the first stream stops. It’s puzzling why I can do multiple streams to different rooms with the Sonos app but not when I initiate it with Alexa, but that’s definitely the way it is.

So:

• Can WiiM play different Spotify streams to different WiiM Amps simultaneously with one user account from a Spotify Premium Family Plan, the way Sonos can?
• Can it do this when asked to play the streams via Alexa?

This is a pretty specific scenario so I’ve had trouble finding answers online - there’s contradictory information out there, and plenty of it is just flat-out wrong based on my own testing.

Any chance anyone reading this could test it? To match my scenario you’d need multiple WiiM devices, Alexa, and a Spotify Premium Family account. Considering the size of the project I’d probably be willing to buy a few WiiM devices and test it myself and return them if they can’t do it, but I figure someone here with a similar setup might be able to test this and save me that trouble.

Thanks!

[Notes:
* We were only able to test with a Spotify Premium Family Plan, but the behavior might be the same with a regular Spotify Premium account; we don’t know, but the client is keeping their Family Plan regardless.
* Sonos can be configured to use multiple Spotify accounts, and it can be set up that each account is really just the various members of the Premium Family Plan. However, all streams would play from the designated default account in the Sonos config unless you specify the source when playing, which is a complication the client understandably doesn’t want.
* They only have 5 Sonos zones in their current home, so I wasn’t able to find out the limit of simultaneous streams. I have a hunch it might be 6, because that’s how many users are available on a Family Plan, even though in my scenario Sonos is only configured to use one user for all the streams. 6 simultaneous streams is enough for the new house, so I’m not terribly worried about this.]

 

[Burnside]

I suspect Sonos have engineered around Spotify’s constraint (or have a special arrangement with Spotify) but my understanding and experience is that Spotify only allows one stream per account, and that’s what underpins your comments about Alexa as it links at the account level so can’t support multiple streams across multiple echos. When asked this in Alexa forums, my stock answer is that the best that can be done with Alexa is to use an Amazon household account with two adult Amazon accounts, with each linked to a corresponding Spotify account, asking “Alexa, switch account” to swap between them. Any further accounts need to use Spotify Connect to cast from their phone to an echo.

Given that WiiM doesn’t have a direct Spotify interface but relies on Spotify Connect, multiple different Spotify accounts can happily cast to any WiiM on the local network, but as I say, that falls down when Alexa is used.

Back to Alexa, I again often suggest that if you want to play music in a multiple user setup, you’re better off with Amazon Music’s family plan as that supports up to six simultaneous streams over one or more accounts. Apple Music is similar, but WiiM’s Alexa interface doesn’t support Apple Music. Even then, you might fall foul of recommendations being based on all users’ playback, although Amazon do suggest that in a family account they should be based on individuals but that’s not been my experience.

Even with Alexa, unless you use the paired Wiim remote, you’d need to have an echo device in the same Alexa room group with the corresponding WiiM device set as preferred speaker as the WiiM devices themselves don’t have a microphone.

It’s a hard nut to crack when using Spotify…

 

[bjkramer]

Interesting that maybe Sonos did something special with Spotify. Alternatively I wonder if it's the Family Plan that allows Sonos to do it; I never tested it with a regular Premium account. But your point about Alexa using Spotify Connect makes me think you're right that Sonos is doing something funky when playing Spotify from the App that allows it to bypass the normal 1 stream limit. Grrr.

As for Amazon Music - one of my other clients wanted to use Amazon Music because she figured she'd most likely have the smoothest experience using Amazon's music service with Amazon's hardware (she already had lots of Echo devices). So we set up an Amazon Music Family Plan account and got Echo Link Amp devices for all her zones (I think it was 7). Turns out those Echo Link devices are hot garbage, and have rightly been discontinued. She still uses them, and for the most part the hardware works OK, but the service occasionally complains that there are too many simultaneous streams even though some streams have already been stopped; there's no way to clear them out, you have to just wait a while until the Amazon gods decide you can stream again. I suspect this is only a problem because she's only using one user on the Family Plan and it would allow more streams if more users were configured, but her family members don't each have their own devices, they all want to be able to play music in whatever room they happen to be in, so there's just one user set up.

Fun Fact: every single Amazon Echo Link and Echo Link Amp ever made use the same MAC address on their ethernet port, so if you have more than one you cannot use ethernet, you have to use wifi. Ugh.

The client for this upcoming large project doesn't care much about Spotify's playlists or other features, so they'd be willing to switch to any service that would do what they want. If Pandora or YouTube Music or whatever could allow for multiple simultaneous streams on one account I'm sure they'd happily switch. Or of course they could sign up for 17 Spotify Premium accounts

 

[Burnside]

Re Alexa and one user account, that’s how I would set it up - all echos are registered to that account and it uses one of the six available memberships of the the Amazon music family plan and could be viewed as Alexa’s music account. That should allow up to six simultaneous streams, and the other five memberships can be left unused or used on phones/tablets for personalised use with playlists etc shared back to Alexa’s account for playback on echos.
Maybe the unexpired streams you mention could be seen and stopped in the Alexa app as it has improved a little with respect to music, as has casting in the Amazon music app