Play Spotify On A UPnP Renderer

09 February 2014 at 23:24

A recent update to the fantastic android BubbleUPnP application allows you to stream the audio playing on your android device to a UPnP renderer. This means you can play Spotify, Google Music, etc on your phone or tablet and have it stream the audio to your television, Sonos, or Wd Live, for instance.

What's required for this to work? Firstly, and this will be a sticking point for many, your android device must be rooted. This is because Audio Cast relies on the xposed framework. A BubbleUPnP xposed module was added to the recent update to BubbleUPnP. This enables the Audio Cast functionality.

In order to play to another device it must be able to play a wmv stream or have a UPnP renderer. A number of modern televisions include this as well as many streaming boxes such as Sonos or Squeezeboxes; check your device's documentation if you're not sure. It's fairly simple to setup a computer with a renderer by installing xbmc, plex, or adding an extension to foobar2000, for example.

Unfortunately not all content will play from your android device - if an application uses a non-standard method of playing audio it won't work. Rdio is an example.

I did hit a couple of hitches playing from my HTC One. Firstly I couldn't always play from it - sometimes I had to navigate to the Audio Cast file from my television to get things running. Also my WD Live box doesn't show up as a renderer for some bizarre reason. This isn't the first time I've been bitten by HTC UPnP issues, meaning I use another device for this purpose.