OMG Apple Airplay is so bad. I never know where the audio is going to come from, or even what it's even going to play. It maintains multiple states but it's hard to understand the association between the GUI on various devices, the audio devices themselves, and the states. It's also buggy as hell.
My wife is having a private conversation by zoom in the next room. I'm trying to be really quiet. I put on my AirPods Max (which are otherwise great headphones) and press the button ON THE HEADPHONES to restart the music. Music immediately blares out of my laptop (!) at high volume. I don't even realise because the noise cancelling in the headphones is actually really good.
Sometimes I like to watch TV in the morning before she gets up. That's also a bit of a challenge...
@dpwiz The problem to solve is fairly complex: there are multiple audio sources to control, each of which can output to multiple destinations (ie. speakers). The source and destination may be the same device. A device that's usually a source can be the destination of another device. Multiple destinations may actually be tied together eg. as stereo pairs. There may even be multiple paths to the same device - I can go from phone->Apple TV->TV or directly phone->Apple TV app on TV. (And the TV also supports Chromecast.)
For me the problem (besides the bugs) is that it's presented textually with old-fashioned GUI widgets. I feel like a nice graphical presentation showing what's connected to what would be better. The bugs are probably there because the programmers are as confused as the users!