HomePod Major issues with HomePods in my house, need SERIOUS help

[mikejd1]

I got rid of all of our Amazon echos several months ago in replace of all HomePods. Since then, I’ve had nothing but trouble getting the HomePods to conduct a simple task, ask one HomePods to play a song, or musician, etc…from one HomePods to the rest of the HomePods isn’t he house. I have two OG HomePods as Apple TV speakers in one room, 2 minis as default speakers in another room for an Apple TV, and another single speaker as the default for an Apple TV. This alone I’ve noticed was causing all sorts of problems, so i removed the HomePods as the default speakers on the Apple TV’s.

So when I finally ask one of them to play a song, I’ve tried “in every room”, “everywhere”, i’d even name every single damn room the HomePods are in…but then, no music will play for a good solid minute, then finally, the music will play on the device I spoke too, however, no other HomePods will play sound!!!!!!! But i see the Siri animation on all the HomePods so i know they are trying to play music, no??? I then look at my phone, go into the home app, and i see that every HomePods is in fact playing the same music, and then i look in the airplay setting in the music controller, and all the homepods are playing the music and the volume controls are active. Finally, after 5 or 10 minutes, the sound will all of a sudden start playing on another device, finally!!! But then, other devices still no sound…then one will cut out, and stop, but others will keep playing. This is the absolute worst apple product EVER developed, EVER. Ive searched for this same issue on here but no one seems to have solved this issue so i figured i’d try one more thread

Ive done everything from removing speakers as defaults for Apple TV’s, reboooted my mesh network every single day, i even went so far as to rebuild my entire network in my house.

Any thoughts?? Thanks!

Mikke

 

[Itinj24]

Here’s a thought… Apple Software, especially HomePodOS has become a heaping pile of warm donkey dung. I can tell you that you’re not alone with these issues. The 15 series of Apple software has shattered a lot of dreams for many people. Me included. We can only pray the next update will fix everything. Don’t hold your breath.

 

[TonyC28]

It seems like the AirPlay part of things has gotten messed up in recent iOS 15 updates. If I say “play Metallica on all HomePods” most of the time it works properly. But sometimes it also plays on one of my Apple TVs that doesn’t even have HomePods connected to it. Also sometimes the music will look like it’s playing in the AirPlay settings screen but it’s not. If I adjust the volume for the individual HomePod that isn’t playing that will kick start it.

 

[StumpyBloke]

I got rid of all of our Amazon echos several months ago in replace of all HomePods. Since then, I’ve had nothing but trouble getting the HomePods to conduct a simple task, ask one HomePods to play a song, or musician, etc…from one HomePods to the rest of the HomePods isn’t he house. I have two OG HomePods as Apple TV speakers in one room, 2 minis as default speakers in another room for an Apple TV, and another single speaker as the default for an Apple TV. This alone I’ve noticed was causing all sorts of problems, so i removed the HomePods as the default speakers on the Apple TV’s.

So when I finally ask one of them to play a song, I’ve tried “in every room”, “everywhere”, i’d even name every single damn room the HomePods are in…but then, no music will play for a good solid minute, then finally, the music will play on the device I spoke too, however, no other HomePods will play sound!!!!!!! But i see the Siri animation on all the HomePods so i know they are trying to play music, no??? I then look at my phone, go into the home app, and i see that every HomePods is in fact playing the same music, and then i look in the airplay setting in the music controller, and all the homepods are playing the music and the volume controls are active. Finally, after 5 or 10 minutes, the sound will all of a sudden start playing on another device, finally!!! But then, other devices still no sound…then one will cut out, and stop, but others will keep playing. This is the absolute worst apple product EVER developed, EVER. Ive searched for this same issue on here but no one seems to have solved this issue so i figured i’d try one more thread

Ive done everything from removing speakers as defaults for Apple TV’s, reboooted my mesh network every single day, i even went so far as to rebuild my entire network in my house.

Any thoughts?? Thanks!

Mikke

Can I please suggest you report this to Apple.

Apples arrogance and apathy has reached new levels and unless people really scream from the rooftops about this they will take their usual approach and do absolutely sweet FA about it.

 

[dotme]

It's most likely the network (I know... I really did read your post. You have a mesh and you rebuilt it). Airplay is a very chatty protocol because of the back-and-forth necessary to keep everything in sync, and when you're running whole-house audio it will place a big demand on the network. I had issues too until I straightened out my network. I now have 9 OGs and 5 minis, mostly stereo-paired, and I can airplay to all of them at once. My point is, this stuff can work... and does, usually.

Can I ask about your network setup? How many APs do you have? Are they gigabit (wired) backhauled? Do you have a lot of nearby neighbors (Apt complex for example) that also run WiFi and could be stepping on your signal? Can you load up a single song on your iPhone, and then airplay it everywhere?

 

[mikejd1]

It's most likely the network (I know... I really did read your post. You have a mesh and you rebuilt it). Airplay is a very chatty protocol because of the back-and-forth necessary to keep everything in sync, and when you're running whole-house audio it will place a big demand on the network. I had issues too until I straightened out my network. I now have 9 OGs and 5 minis, mostly stereo-paired, and I can airplay to all of them at once. My point is, this stuff can work... and does, usually.

Can I ask about your network setup? How many APs do you have? Are they gigabit (wired) backhauled? Do you have a lot of nearby neighbors (Apt complex for example) that also run WiFi and could be stepping on your signal? Can you load up a single song on your iPhone, and then airplay it everywhere?

Hey, thanks for this, yea i saw a bunch of threads stating it’s network related. So, in a last attempt to try one more thing, I realized i had lossless turned on on all my homepods, so i decided to turn off lossless and sure enough, the homepods work EVERY, SINGLE, time now. The thing that sucks is, lossless must be killing my network with the homepods. I have an ASUS ZenWiFi ET8 mesh network with pretty much the default settings enabled and Fios 1 GiG plan, and i have two nodes, with about 40 devices connected to the network. usually about 33 devices connected to the downstairs node, and about 7 device on the upstairs node.

I would like the lossless, but right now i could care less about that if it means these f’n damn homepods work on the first try!!!! Ill keep an eye on this to see if it’s just coincidence over the next few days.

 

[dotme]

Ah! Yeah my understanding is that lossless is an even higher bitrate, requiring a much fatter pipe. The connection to the internet is fine, it's all that chatter between HomePods on the local network that's probably bogging you down. Happy to hear you've made some progress... it's great when it works. Only additional suggestion I could make would be to wire the backhaul if at all possible (assuming it's not already). I lucked out and was able to run cat6 to each AP and that helped a ton.

 

[Itinj24]

It's most likely the network (I know... I really did read your post. You have a mesh and you rebuilt it). Airplay is a very chatty protocol because of the back-and-forth necessary to keep everything in sync, and when you're running whole-house audio it will place a big demand on the network. I had issues too until I straightened out my network. I now have 9 OGs and 5 minis, mostly stereo-paired, and I can airplay to all of them at once. My point is, this stuff can work... and does, usually.

Can I ask about your network setup? How many APs do you have? Are they gigabit (wired) backhauled? Do you have a lot of nearby neighbors (Apt complex for example) that also run WiFi and could be stepping on your signal? Can you load up a single song on your iPhone, and then airplay it everywhere?

I’m more curious as to what your network looks like… we have a very similar amount of HomePods. Also, do you have default audio to AppleTV set up on any of them? Thanks.

 

[mikejd1]

I’m more curious as to what your network looks like… we have a very similar amount of HomePods. Also, do you have default audio to AppleTV set up on any of them? Thanks.

We did, default Audio is abysmal. The delays when just navigating the UI, and the volume and back controls was so bad we disabled the default Audio and just use TV speakers now. Default Audio is so bad, its just unusable

 

[Itinj24]

We did, default Audio is abysmal. The delays when just navigating the UI, and the volume and back controls was so bad we disabled the default Audio and just use TV speakers now. Default Audio is so bad, its just unusable

Yeah it’s been a junk feature connectivity wise and destroyed the connection for many other clients in my house.

I’m curious what dotme has going on there. I just had shielded Cat6a ran through every single space in my house to try to mitigate the network issues that HomePods and AppleTVs are causing. I’m willing to do anything to have a solid network. I have the eero Pro 6 with 4 nodes currently on wireless backhaul (haven’t had the time to terminate the Ethernet yet). I’ve tried reorganizing them, adding, removing nodes, etc. Could also be the eero is garbage.

Don’t get me wrong. I love the Apple eco system, but only when it works lol. I just wish they got their act together and start releasing reliable software. They made such a huge stink of this default audio feature but it’s terrible, like you, I and many other are experiencing.

 

[pup]

My experience is that this is a Siri problem more than AirPlay. I have no problem* manually choosing speakers on the Mac or iOS, but I've never ever been able to get Siri to reliably play something to specific speakers, even without a HomePod complicating things.


*'no problem', in this case, means it drives me insane every time do it because of the literally malicious UI apple has chosen to inflict us with.

 

[B/D]

The intriguing thing here is that lossless shouldn't take more than 2mbps of bandwidth at most (for ALAC files).

However, and for some reason than I am incapable of understand, enabling lossless audio for the homepods creates considerable issues in the entire network, buffering and popping issues. Go figure.

 

[mikejd1]

The intriguing thing here is that lossless shouldn't take more than 2mbps of bandwidth at most (for ALAC files).

However, and for some reason than I am incapable of understand, enabling lossless audio for the homepods creates considerable issues in the entire network, buffering and popping issues. Go figure.

I seriously cannot believe this was the issue. Over 24 hours later, with multiple trials the music is flawless through the entire house with lossless turned off. This was months of headaches and pain, only to make one last attempt to solve this by changing that setting. Unreal.

 

[LeeW]

I tried the homepod route a while back and had similar issues, turned out it was an issue with lossless.

 

[B/D]

I seriously cannot believe this was the issue. Over 24 hours later, with multiple trials the music is flawless through the entire house with lossless turned off. This was months of headaches and pain, only to make one last attempt to solve this by changing that setting. Unreal.

Yeah. I feel you. You see, I consider myself a calm, logic driven, rational person. I don't like what does not make sense and this does not make any sense at all.

How, pray tell me, how is possible that in the era of ultra fast fiber connections, complex and very powerful home routers and mesh networks, that can stream huge 4K HDR files without a hitch, CD quality losslessly compressed audio files, which take only a tiny little bit of bandwidth in comparison, can cause such a myriad of buffering issues, sound static issues, popping audio interferences issue?.

I´ll tell you how, its not our network, our routers or our connections. Its sloppy, poorly written and unoptimized software.


Its the only possible explanation.

 

[B/D]

The good thing here is that there is a huge probability than you can´t hear the difference between AAC 256kbps VBR files and ALAC files, so if that´s the case you can turn off lossless permanently.

 

[B/D]

Interesting. I just have been suggested to change the Home App network setting from "People on this house" or "On the same network" to "Everyone" and the buffering issues with lossless audio just stopped. Go figure.

 

[mikejd1]

Interesting. I just have been suggested to change the Home App network setting from "People on this house" or "On the same network" to "Everyone" and the buffering issues with lossless audio just stopped. Go figure.

Weird. Mine was always set to Everyone, lossless and it was junk.

 

[B/D]

Weird. Mine was always set to Everyone, lossless and it was junk.

False alarm. Buffering came back with a vengeance. Oh well.

Can you tell the difference between lossy and lossless on the homepods?.

 

[mikejd1]

False alarm. Buffering came back with a vengeance. Oh well.

Can you tell the difference between lossy and lossless on the homepods?.

Lol. Absolutely zero difference in
Quality. So lossless will stay off forever. Months and months of my life impacted by this, swearing, I returned multiple HomePods thinking they were broke and replacing them.

 

[B/D]

I feel you. Just out of curiosity, what kind of problems playback wise did you experienced with lossless on?. Any of the following (these are the ones that I suffer)?.

A). Extremely long delay in starting the playback.

B). A track will randomly cut out/stop/buffer and then continue, out of the blue.

C). Occasional static/interference/popping issues on some songs.


All of the above.


?

 

[mikejd1]

I feel you. Just out of curiosity, what kind of problems playback wise did you experienced with lossless on?. Any of the following (these are the ones that I suffer)?.

A). Extremely long delay in starting the playback.

B). A track will randomly cut out/stop/buffer and then continue, out of the blue.

C). Occasional static/interference/popping issues on some songs.


All of the above.


exactly the same as all of yours.

 

[B/D]

Then is definitely an Apple problem, not the network or bad wifi.

 

[mikejd1]

Then is definitely an Apple problem, not the network or bad wifi.

Yeap. Also. I had to disable HomePods being the default speakers on my tvs too. The delay in doing basic tasks like navigating and. Just turning up or down the volume made me
Throw the controller across the room.

 

[B/D]

Yeap. Also. I had to disable HomePods being the default speakers on my tvs too. The delay in doing basic tasks like navigating and. Just turning up or down the volume made me
Throw the controller across the room.

Hardwiring my Apple TV to the router solved these issues for me.