[pprotas]

AirPlay is different from the desired functionality. It basically uses your mac as a remote speaker, instead of actually opening the music app on the computer and playing music there.

You can test this out quite easily: play any audio from your mac (YouTube, Apple Music, whatever) and then try to pause it on your watch. This is not possible.

Spotify Connect allows you to do this easily on the other hand.

[freetime2]

Apple’s “home” app allows for a bit of that. You can control music on homepods/apple tv from any device. I don’t think you can control a Mac like a speaker, though. And I actually find it buggy as heck when trying to control a speaker from multiple devices - requests are constantly timing out, the UI doesn’t update properly with the current state, etc. In practice I always just use AirPlay and control it from a single device.

[b15h0p]

That is true for AirPlay, but AirPlay 2 works differently: It controls playback on a device (say, a HomePod) and all devices on the network see what is playing on that device and can control playback.

Still, this does not seem to be what OOP wants.