Home Airplay 2 streaming to different combinations of rooms?

[Frank O]

We have Airplay 2-compliant speakers/stereos in three rooms -- call them the living room, kitchen and study. We would like to stream to them simultaneously from our Macs and iPhones in different combinations. Sometimes we want to stream in sync to the living room and kitchen, but not the study. Other times we want to stream in sync to the kitchen and study, but not the living room.

I was told I could set up zones by going into the Home app on an iOS device. I found when I did so, though, that the app would only let me assign a given room/device to a single zone. So I can set up a zone for, say, the living room and kitchen. But I can't then create another zone to cover the living room and study -- at least as far as I've been able to find.

Is there a way to do this? Or is there any third-party app that allows simultaneous streaming to rooms in different combinations? I have to think this is a capability a lot of people would want.

 

[BlankStar]

Can't do what you want but you can use Siri. "play music in the living room and kitchen". She'll do just that. You can also ask to adjust this. "stop playing in the kitchen" and the music will continue in the living room.

 

[pup]

Hmm, works for me, unless I'm misunderstanding what you're trying to do. Go to one of the rooms, tap edit, tap the arrow by the room name, then tap zones. From there you can create new zones and select as many as you want for that room. The problem you'll find though is that zones don't show up in the airplay list in either iOS or iTunes, so the only way to use them is via Siri. It's a silly oversight on apple's part.

 

[Frank O]

Actually, I asked around more and found there's some really nice functionality on iPhone and iPad.

On those devices, if I start an audio source (in my case, music streaming from KCRW on Safari) and then open Control Center (on iPhone swipe up from bottom, on iPad swipe down from upper right), then tap the Airplay icon (circle with a triangle at the bottom), this opens a display that shows each controllable audio source. As I write this, I'm seeing one entry for the radio station on Safari and another one for Apple TV.

Then by tapping one of these sources, and again tapping the Airplay icon within it, it opens a list of available devices to stream to, and I can select them in any combination.

This has worked great the last couple of days, with streaming from the iPad to a couple of rooms. The "zones" defined in the Home app aren't visible, but I can do the same thing just by picking rooms individually.

Unfortunately this capability is not available in macOS, at least now. So I just go with the iPad to run the streaming.

 

[BlankStar]

That's the basic Airplay 2 functionality. I pretty sure no one mentioned it because everyone assumed you already knew that.
Since you asked about zones in the home app I thought you were looking for a more "smart" way to select the speakers. I hardly ever use the manual picking because it's just too many taps on my screen. Asking Siri is much easier 🙃