In this article Jason Snell laments the state of AirPlay on macOS and I totally agree it’s broken. I have 2 Sonos speakers in my office. One Sonos One and one Sonos Roam. The Roam does double duty as it moves around the house a few times a week to be a speaker for others in the house.

I almost never play anything from macOS because it’s so broken and iPadOS/iOS is just a bit better. A number of times a day my iPad will think it’s playing music to my Sonos speakers, but it’s not. If I toggle play/pause it starts playing, but it starts playing the track it just finished playing.

I found that wiring the Sonos One improved the overall experience, but it still has the audio pause issue.

I’m sure someone is thinking I should just use the Sonos app and have the speakers play audio themselves. First, that does help but the Sonos speakers seem to loose track of themselves once a day anyway and stop playing.

Second, I can’t set my speaker up in a stereo pair so I can’t play audio out of both of them like I can via AirPlay.

Third, all the default audio controls for my iPad don’t really work with the Sonos app so I can’t just play/pause audio from a keyboard. That means when it pauses or I want to adjust volume it requires far more interaction.

I’ll stick with what I’m doing, but Apple needs to fix AirPlay.