Windows 11 will finally let you share audio to multiple devices at once

Microsoft is working on a new audio feature for Windows 11 that will allow users to connect to two devices at once to share audio with. The feature will be dubbed "shared audio" and works just like sharing audio with two Bluetooth devices does on your iPhone or Android device.

First spotted by Phantomofearth on X, the shared audio feature is currently hidden in the latest Windows 11 preview builds, and will eventually be accessible via the Windows 11 Quick Settings menu on the Taskbar. From there, you will be able to select the two devices you want to connect to for audio sharing.

"Select two output devices to connect" says the prompt, with the UI providing a list of audio devices that you can select from. Once you've selected the two devices you want to connect to, press the share button and audio will begin being sent to the devices you've selected.

Up until now, Windows PCs have only really supported outputting audio to one device at a time. This has meant if you had two people who wanted to listen to audio in two separate pairs of headphones on a Windows PC, that wasn't natively possible on the platform. The new shared audio feature should finally make that possible.

Because Windows hasn't had a native way of doing this before, many OEMs and third-party developers have come up with workarounds, such as creating a virtual audio device that could handle outputting to multiple devices. Users will hopefully no longer need to deal with those third-party tools to get this basic functionality.

Smartphones have had the ability to share to multiple audio devices for many years, so it's good to finally see the same functionality being built into Windows natively. In fact, Microsoft has slowly been adding smartphone creature comforts to Windows over the last few months.

Recently, the company added the ability to see your laptop's battery percentage directly on the Taskbar, and it'll soon be bringing that same information to the lockscreen, just like on a smartphone. The OS is also soon getting a dedicated emoji button on the Taskbar, that will appear whenever the user is typing to make it easier to input emoji.

Microsoft is also working on several big improvements to the OS in general, including a new Start menu interface that combines the all apps list with the main page. It also shows more pinned apps and has a more customizable layout that lets you turn off things like the Recommended area.

That new Start menu is paired with the new Phone Link companion interface, which appears as a sidebar in the Start menu and shows an overview of your phone's status, including recent messages, notifications, and photos. You can also quickly share files with your phone using this new interface.

There's lots of big features on the horizon for Windows 11, including the upcoming version 25H2 release that Microsoft has now confirmed is coming later this year. Many of the features in development for version 25H2 will also roll out to the current version 24H2, the company has confirmed.