HomePod HomePod w/ Apple Music?

[saxman211]

Does anyone here use their HomePod to stream music via Tidal, Spotify, or Pandora? I see the HomePod is on sale at Best Buy and I'm thinking of getting one, but I'm wondering what's the point of getting it if it's not compatible with anything other than AppleMusic... Also, what are some other good uses for the HomePod?

 

[chabig]

You can stream anything to it with AirPlay.

 

[gigaguy]

I play my music library on my pair. Not a subscriber to streams. Sounds great.
The BB deals are good. esp open boxes. I was tempted to get another but I prefer pairs.

 

[saxman211]

I play my music library on my pair. Not a subscriber to streams. Sounds great.
The BB deals are good. esp open boxes. I was tempted to get another but I prefer pairs.

What do you mean by pairs?

 

[Bogstandard]

I bought a single unit and it sounded terrible. It still sounded bad a few days later.
I decided that wasn't for some reason "learning" the room.
I bought another to see/hear if their purported cross callibration would help.
It did. In less than 2 minutes. They now can live up to their sonic limitations.
I'm confident that the homepod works much better in pairs. More $$.
siri remains obtuse and defaults to an apple music frame of reference when it misunderstands requests.

 

[chabig]

What do you mean by pairs?

Pairs means you have two HomePods. Placed apart, one will play the left channel of stereo music and the other will play the right channel. The spatial separation makes stereo sound much better than one speaker playing everything.

 

[saxman211]

So is it worth it? for $199?

 

[danmart]

I play my music library on my pair. Not a subscriber to streams.

We started out that way. I had an ‘iTunes in iCloud’ subscription and all my music uploaded. When we first got a HomePod we just used that to stream, and it worked well. In this context you are playing music from the cloud, but it is music you have bought / ripped to iTunes.

After doing this for a few weeks and learning that it has some limitations we decide to try out Apple Music and never went back. My specific recollections are dim, now, as it is over a year ago. IIRC correctly it was difficult to stream different media to different HomePods using iTunes Cloud account. It was also limited in some way by my iphone needing to be in the house at the time (my account is the ‘master’ in our family since I am the tech-head. My wife also has an iPhone but that wasn’t good enough for the system).

With Apple Music, especially a family account, you can use it very smoothly across multiple devices in multiple rooms.

So is it worth it? for $199?

Only you know if it worth it to you, but I have six...

 

[waw74]

So is it worth it? for $199?

I've got one, went sonos shortly after
I keep the HomePod because I use home kit, and it's convenient.
if they ever add siri to sonos (since Alexa and goole are already there) or they come out with something comparable to the echo dot, I'll sell the HomePod.

if you don't have Apple Music, siri on the HomePod isn't happy, All she wants to do is play music.

a couple times a week, I'll ask siri to do something with lights, and she'll say "there's nothing playing on this HomePod"
once or twice a month I'll ask her to turn on a light, and she starts playing random music (not from Apple Music obviously, but some tune in stations)
and sometimes she cuts off the end of my sentences, meaning she acts on a partial command, and normally affects the entire house's lighting.

look at sonos, all of the apps you mentioned play directly on the speaker, so no need to fiddle with airplay
and they're a bit cheaper than HomePod, if you find the right sale, you can almost do 2 sonos for one HomePod.
Since the music plays on the speaker itself, you can use any sonos app to control it. (start music from your computer, and change the volume or skip a track from your phone)

with sonos, airplay actually works (I've seen several posts here, about airplay to a stereo pair from a Mac not working on HomePod)

and in the grand scheme of "smart assistants" siri is in third place of three
great for homekit, but "general knowledge" questions are hit or miss,