Chrome OS has a strange relationship with letting users listen to multiple simultaneous audio sources

It’s fairly common for anyone using a computer to run two audio sources at the same time. Maybe it’s our short attention spans or perhaps it’s my generation’s fault – the millennials. It’s still cool to blame everything on the millennials, right? Either way, on Windows, I often have music playing while I am in a group fitness workout over Zoom to stay motivated or to distract myself from every grueling second of that one-legged wall sit.

Other times two sources of sound running simultaneously may be useful is when you’re watching Twitch and listening to music. Believe it or not, this is fairly common. Whatever the case, there are use cases for it and they’re so important that the moment I tried to do any of these things on my Chromebook, I immediately noticed the lack of functionality in this area.

What’s interesting is that at some point a few years ago, Google allowed this! There was a Chrome developer flag called “Audio Focus Enforcement“, and toggling it off would allow you to stream as many apps or web apps as you wanted at the same time – be they audio or audio and video.

As Google giveth, Google taketh away though, as you’re all aware, so that flag didn’t last long, and for some reason, the company decided that Chrome OS would function with just one and only one audio source at a time. Starting with M80, the flag was yanked, and it left me and others very sad. In fact, anywhere you go online, you’ll find people asking if it’s possible to fire up two things at once, only to be told that it’s no longer a feature.

Now, I can make a case for this being useful because sometimes on Windows, I’m pressing play on one video and I want my music to turn off while I focus on what’s being said, especially if it’s educational content. Because Microsoft’s OS isn’t set up in the same way that Google’s is, I have to manually go and pause my music. Mind you, there are no global media controls baked into the quick settings on Windows, so it’s a very annoying process to have to go and find out where the sound is coming from.

However, I’m going to go ahead and say that far more often this is annoying more than it is useful, and I would love to see Google take the restrictions off in the future. Maybe I’m a part of the minority, and most people probably really like that Chrome OS automatically stops all of your audio and focuses on what you hit play on, but I think a far better approach would be to add a toggle to turn this on and off into the Settings app.

What’s even more interesting is that while you can’t currently play a Youtube video and any other audio source – say Twitch or Youtube Music, you can, in fact, play multiple Youtube videos simultaneously. This is why I say that Google’s relationship with this feature is incredibly strange. I’m no developer, so I’m not sure if Youtube can manage this because it’s baked into the web app, but at an operating system level, this is certainly on lockdown outside of Youtube.

At the very least, I hope that the developer flag for disabling the forced audio focus returns so that the geeks who really care about this can have their cake and eat it too. Oh, and if you haven’t yet noticed, I love me some cake. Let me know in the comments if you’re ever bothered by this odd decision in Chrome OS, or if you manage just fine with one non-ADHD audio source at a time.