Mystery DJ

Something spooky happened one time I was listening to music on Spotify. Right in the middle of the song I was listening to, it jumped to another song that wasn't in my playlist and even the kind that I never listen to.

I thought it was a glitch, so I went back to my playlist and continued. It happened again, and again, and again. Had it been random songs, I wouldn't have been freaked out, but it was the same exact song it kept going back to.

I had my laptop and phone right before me on my desk. The only explanation I could come up with was that either my phone or laptop was acting up and messing with Spotify playback. It turned out to be neither.

Moments later, I remembered that I was also signed on my iPad, but it was with my nephew. Knowing the young chap, I had a pretty good guess of what was really happening, but it'd be strange if true because it was 5 AM.

It turned out it was my nephew behind the curtains all along. And apparently, we are struggling with the same problem. He was up so early and wanted to listen to his favourite artist. He was trying to pick a song, but he couldn't hear anything, no matter how much he turned up the volume. Rather, it was playing on my end. The spooky situation then made sense to me.

One of the things I like about Spotify is its cross-device sync. As long as I am signed in with the same account on all of my devices, I can have seamless playback across them all. I'd start a song on my phone and continue on my desktop or my iPad, and control the playback from any one of them. I use this feature often, and I find it very useful.

It's like having a remote control with the cross-device sync. For example, I could be playing songs from my laptop with my speakers connected, and then I would be able to change songs, adjust the volume, and control the playback—shuffle, play/pause, and add to queue.

For cross-device sync to work, though, all the devices have to be connected to be online. And from what I recently learned, you can have the devices on different networks or the same wifi.