I just purchased at HomePod for the first time on a Memorial Day sale and after setting it up with my iPhone I tried saying "Hey Siri, play this_artist (or that_artist)" and absolutely nothing worked. It turns out that my entire music library is comprised of CDs that I've purchased and ripped during my life (literally thousands of dollars worth) and this miserable HomePod lump can't play any of it because I'm not additionally paying Apple extra money in the form of Apple Music or ITunes Match or whatever. I've was dumbfounded to learn this! I can't even play my own music on HomePod - WTF!!
I was going to return the thing over the weekend but thought I'd wait until this Apple Event to see if they grew a brain and enabled this feature. I don't believe it was mentioned during the presentation but I might be wrong. Does anybody know?
You are - like me - in the wrong department here. I would love to have a HomePod setup here, but as it is not capable to PLAY my locally stored music, it is as useless to me, as it is to you. (I know, it streams it from the iPhone...)
As for now, there are some 3-5 radiostations available, none of them of my country, so the support of TuneIn goes into the right direction.
But it remains a purely streaming loudspeaker with limited functions. You have to have a second device, that streams the music to the HomePod - or an Apple server, that does the same thing.
I will stick with my
Sonos setup for quite a while I think, because it just does exactly, what I want it to do. It has its own database, reads MY music from a little server, plays song X in version Y (not Z) and not the streamlined iTunes match version, Apple wants me to listen to. I know, I can make it play all my music from iTunes on my Mac, but I do not want to have that machine running all the time.
You are right,
Mike MA there is no technical reason, your use case could not work. Apple does not want you to use the HomePod that way.