Finally… Amazon have made it possible for us to use the Echo to play music across more than one device at the same time. It’s also really simple to set up and use too.
What does this mean?
You can now ask two or more of your Echo devices to play the same music at the same time – meaning you can have your entire house filled with your endless Meat Loaf playlists (yeah, I know my readership). You can also play music on just some of your Echo devices (e.g. just on those devices downstairs). You have to do a small amount of set-up first, but it’s simple enough.
How do you enable multi-room playback on Echo?
- Dive into your alexa app
- Click on Smart Home
- Click on Groups
- Create group
- Multi-room music group
- Select which devices you want in this group and give it a name (it does suggest some)
- Click ‘create group’ … this may take a minute
Once you’ve done the above, just say “play meatloaf <GROUP NAME>”. So if you’re group was called “upstairs” just say “play meatloaf upstairs”.
It’s working well for me so far and it’s a great new feature. Apparently this will only work on Echo and Echo dot and will only play music, not things like news or books – oddly you cannot fast forward or rewind.
UPDATE
Thanks to Tony in the comments for pointing this out – you can only add each device to one group at the moment. This means you can’t have an ‘all echos’ group and another one for ‘downstairs echos’. This is a real limitation and I’m hoping it’ll be ‘fixed’ soon.
UK Echo Community 
Am I doing something wrong, because I cannot seem to put an echo into more than one music group?
I have created an everywhere group but if I then try to create a downstairs group I can’t add anything. Obviously I would want all the downstairs devices in both groups, but this did not seem to work when I tried it.
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Cripes, you’re right. I tried it a number of times, but I deleted the groups each time. You seem to only be able to have the devices in one music group. That’s a huge limitation!
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Hey Tony, I’ve checked with my contact at Amazon – this is apparently a known limitation at the moment. Devices can only be in one group at a time.
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No music groups support for Spotify. Hope it’s coming.
…Also devices can be in one group only, would be nice to be able to have devices in multiple groups.
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Another big limitation is that you cannot use a bluetooth speaker with multi-room. If you have an Echo Dot it will revert to using the internal speaker unless you connect the external one with a cable. I guess this is to prevent sync issues.
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Great point. That’s a real shame too.
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Bit of a let down for me. I have three dots in different rooms, but as two of them are connected to Bluetooth speakers ,the fact that this doesn’t work with Bluetooth speakers is a shame and makes it unusable, might be ok with the bigger echo. But then the limitation of only allowing one device in one group makes the use very limited.
Oh well, very happy with the other features and am looking forward to the intercom, phone features if they ever materialize.
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Yeah I feel similar to you on this. It’s okay… I guess, I now have two echos set up in a group downstairs and it is kind of nice to walk between rooms and have the audio in both, but they could have done this better you’d think.
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Tried it with the TuneIn skill, works great for streaming radio stations to multiple rooms
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