HomePod How do you fix serious HomePod and Airplay 'glitches'

[stocklen]

So, the flakiness of the HomePods is sadly well known..... mine have been a pain but generally OK. Mostly issues resolve themselves such as a single HomePod taking all requests regardless of which was spoken to etc....

However.... ive had a significant problem the last few days and I cannot fix it. I need some advice from those a little more experienced with multi room music and multiple HomePods.

The symptom is that my stereo pair of HomePod minis will wake me up with a radio alarm as normal... the alarm works... but instead of the minis playing a unified stereo sound, each one is independently playing the radio station and as they are a fraction of a second out of sync it sounds terrible....
If I then say 'hey siri stop' only one of them stops.... its almost as if the pairing is broken in some way and they are acting independently and weird.
If I then say 'hey siri play radio X everywhere' it plays all others in the house apart from those 'upstairs' (the stereo pair and an OG HomePod in the study).
If I go to the iPhone and try playing radio X there, I can normally just select airplay to all HomePods in the house - but the stereo pair and study are missing from the Airplay list.

I just cant work out how to troubleshoot this.

Looking at the Home app on the phone, the Stereo pair and the study are still showing but it says 'please connect to the same network to see alarms' however given i only have one network and the phone is connected AND the HomePod minis still have a connection to wifi as they still 'work' it makes no sense. I can tap on the top and it will continue playing the last audio so the network connection is there.

ive tried rebooting the two in the stereo pair but that didnt work.

What other troubleshooting steps can I take in this setup?

All help gratefully received!

 

[dotme]

Looking at the Home app on the phone, the Stereo pair and the study are still showing but it says 'please connect to the same network to see alarms' however given i only have one network and the phone is connected AND the HomePod minis still have a connection to wifi as they still 'work' it makes no sense.

Stereo pairs (and AirPlay) don't just require a WiFi connection, they require a good WiFi connection. Not saying yours isn't, but that's where you start with your troubleshooting. I own 15 HomePods, and I have no issues at all with stereo pairs and AirPlay because I've given them a big fat pipe for communication with each other.

So here's what I would suggest. First, if you are getting any kind of warnings about devices not being on the same network, check your AP and Router documentation for anything resembling "AP Isolation" and turn that off. It's a "feature" of some routers to prevent devices on the same WiFi network from seeing each other - which is very bad for peer-to-peer features like AirPlay and stereo pairing. Also disable Airtime Fairness for the same reason.

Make sure your network is flat, that you only have one DHCP server responsible for handing out IP addresses etc.

Next, make sure you aren't hanging too many devices on one WiFi access point. 10-15 max is my rule of thumb before deploying another AP.

Finally, I recommend setting things up so you can trust your devices to select the best performing WiFi - In other words, set your 5GHz and 2.4GHz to the same SSID and Password and that these are treated as one flat network. Hope this helps give you some things to try.

 

[stocklen]

Stereo pairs (and AirPlay) don't just require a WiFi connection, they require a good WiFi connection. Not saying yours isn't, but that's where you start with your troubleshooting. I own 15 HomePods, and I have no issues at all with stereo pairs and AirPlay because I've given them a big fat pipe for communication with each other.

So here's what I would suggest. First, if you are getting any kind of warnings about devices not being on the same network, check your AP and Router documentation for anything resembling "AP Isolation" and turn that off. It's a "feature" of some routers to prevent devices on the same WiFi network from seeing each other - which is very bad for peer-to-peer features like AirPlay and stereo pairing. Also disable Airtime Fairness for the same reason.

Make sure your network is flat, that you only have one DHCP server responsible for handing out IP addresses etc.

Next, make sure you aren't hanging too many devices on one WiFi access point. 10-15 max is my rule of thumb before deploying another AP.

Finally, I recommend setting things up so you can trust your devices to select the best performing WiFi - In other words, set your 5GHz and 2.4GHz to the same SSID and Password and that these are treated as one flat network. Hope this helps give you some things to try.

Thank you.

Im pretty proficient but some networking stuff is a bit beyond me.

I have amazon eero... and multiple points in the house - none of the HomePods are more than a few feet away from any of them so I dont think signal strength should be an issue.

Not heard of AP isolation but ill google it in relation to the eero system and see if anything pops up.

Just a shame that the good old 'switch it off and on again' works in this regard.

I might try rebooting the gateway eero and see if that helps. recently I added a new node and that coincides with this problem so perhaps somethings gone a bit screwy.

 

[pup]

Set your Eero to bridge mode and that will accomplish what dotme is saying. What you want is for your internet router to be handing out all the IP addresses vs your eero setting up a subnet and handing out its own set of addresses. You may lose some functionality in your eero software (which you should regain in your router settings), but airplay will be much happier.

I don’t know if that will fix your problem though. It sounds to me more like a HomePod problem than an airplay/Wi-Fi one.

 

[stocklen]

Well, it seems I have fixed it.... fingers crossed.

The weird thing was the home app could still 'see' the pair and I could unpair them in the app... but any network information was not showing.

The HomePods WERE attached to my Eero network as the Eero app showed them quite happily connected. The HomePod itself also had a network connection because it 'worked' and played music etc just not correctly.

I tried to unpair and re-pair but that didn't fix it.

In the end I dug around the Eero settings.... I had already restarted the 'gateway' Eero assuming that would restart everything but that didn't work....
Eventually I found under settings 'restart network' which restarted all the Eero nodes.... so I did that and when the network was back up and running all was back to normal with the HomePods stereo pair appearing correctly and showing network info and more importantly functioning correctly again!

thanks to all for the advice in here.