HomePod can't find songs or artists or playlists, but can "play all songs shuffled"

I upgraded my HomePods to 13.3, removed from Homekit, did a hard reset on both HomePods, but playlist capability and not all artists/albums/songs are recognized with my Apple Match subscription unless I am using AirPlay with my iPhone or Mac. An Apple Music subscription is still required if you to only want to use use Siri to play music on the HomePods. See https://www.apple.com/homepod/specs/ where it states "Apple Music subscription for full music functionality" under the "System Requirements" section.

Did I miss a step?

I don't think so, but I'm not seeing this issue myself so I've only got reports from others to go on.

I suppose a workaround would be to make your request on your iPhone and then handoff to the HomePod.

tt2

Exactly the same problem here and it used to work fine. An hour and 45 mins with apple support on the phone didn't fix it and eventually bricked my HomePods. Have just installed the new replacement ones - problem still there.

You're not alone ..

I just sent 45 minutes on the phone .. they said it was because keychain as off. Suddenly siri started to play artists when i asked her to and the call ended as i though it was fixed .. alas i just asked for a different artists and its back to "sorry i couldnt find that"

I've only had it 5 days and its been very underwhelming thus far.

Same here - two long calls of trying “standard” things such as resetting, pairing/unpairing, etc. There doesn’t seem to be a pattern to the songs/albums/artists that aren’t recognized. The only thing we all have in common is iTunes Match. I converted my huge CD collection and have almost 30k songs, the vast majority of which matched. A few weeks ago, Siri started taking a very long time to play a song (saying “I’m on it”, and “just a sec” several times), then last week, it stopped finding songs we’ve played many times before. It definitely has something to do with the way the “HomePod” version of Siri is looking up songs in large libraries. Maybe if we share our findings here, we can isolate the issue?

Unfortunately as usual with Apple you will get inconsistent answers to this question. I started recently (11/22) having this same problem when I decided to reset my HomePods to make Siri talk through the other HomePod (I have two in stereo). From what I understand from talking to their top engineers it is a bug they are working on and haven't fixed yet. So unfortunately if you are having this problem but want to play a playlist the only thing you can do is use your iPhone, iPad, or Mac and play a playlist with the Music application using the HomePod for sound. They may or may not announce when they release a fix so check what version your HomePod is running every now and then. If you notice a newer iOS then try asking Siri to play a playlist. For now we just have to wait until their engineers discover the source, fix it, and release a new iOS. In regard to not recognizing an artist or song, that seems different or the bug is even worse and I would contact Apple Support and as to be connected to a Senior Advisor initially.

85k songs? You don’t need Apple Music because you are Apple Music! I feel the same way - lovely looking paperweights at the moment. I refuse to stream from my phone to the speakers because I have to keep my phone close to the Wi-Fi router and on a charger to avoid dropouts and draining the battery. Really odd that Apple just didn’t give in and allow full control from the music app instead of just being able to shuffle and skip to the next song.

Thanks for the info - especially the “top engineers” bit, as that’s what I suspected. It’s even worse than just not recognizing artists; I’ll ask Siri to play “Time After Time”, and it says, “No problem - here’s Dreams by Fleetwood Mac”. I asked Siri on my Apple TV 4 the same thing (through the remote) and it played the right song without issue. The TV is also connected to my iTunes Match library. By the way, to force Siri to listen and respond on the other speaker of a stereo pair (for a while anyway), physically touch and hold the top of the speaker that you want to respond and instead of saying “Hey Siri”, just ask it something, like the weather. That speaker will now respond to requests. You can also flip your phone face down if it’s responding to “Hey Siri” instead of the HomePod.

I don’t think they’ve fixed it. I just asked it to play a playlist and it still couldn’t be found whilst I have voice recognition on. If I turn it off then it works. It is absolutely unacceptable that this bug has festered for so long. With voice recognition off I can play the playlists but of course no Siri interaction such as sending messages, asking for calendar info. Prior the iOS 13 abomination this all worked. I was also caught up in the original release fiasco whereby I tried to reset to make my music work correctly and it got bricked (replaced a few days layer at Apple store). I am pretty stunned by this and now there was obviously little or no QA undertaken.

you would of though apple would have a checklist. Do their engineers or support

staff not even use their own products? As surely they’d notice this. There are an awful lot of iTunes Match subscribers who do not use/need/or want apple music but have HomePods

Glad to hear your issues seem to be resolved, but I just tried again this morning - same issues for me. Here’s another example: “Hey Siri, play Frankly Mr Shankly by The Smiths”. Response: “I can’t find Frankly Mr Shankly in your music”. Then I try, “Hey Siri, play Frankly Mr Shankly” and the song plays normally. It seems that sometimes Siri can find things by title OR artist OR album, but not any combination thereof.

The skeptic in me thinks this is a ploy to have people switch over to Apple Music! I’ve read up on what would happen to all of the songs I converted - they would not be “mine” anymore and if I stopped my Apple Music subscription, I’d have to load up my library again (from backups - luckily I saved all the CDs I converted as uncompressed files; the CDs are on spindles to save space).

Kenny Freundlich, when you were saying it works with voice recognition turned off do you mean you are playing a playlist via iPhone/iPad and using HomePod as the speakers to get it to work with playlists? Or is their a way you can use HomePods directly with voice recognition turned off?

Having same issue. Tried all the usual stuff. Just asked Siri to disarm us since there is a shortcut to our security and she started to tell me about the song disarm by smashing pumpkins. So that’s not working at the moment either.