Homepod disconnects or stops playing music from itunes randomly

Thanks for sharing Bumbeen. I appreciate you tracking this down and reporting to Apple. I haven't messed with anything for a while but your post gives me hope that the root cause is found. I look forward to hear how your next experiment goes!

Bumbeem - thank you so much for sharing this. My HomePod disconnects from iTunes randomly multiple times during the day. My whole family is now working from home with jobs & school. Having the music disconnect like this is infuriating. Please keep us informed as to Apple's response on this. This hard data is excellent. -- Bryan

I have the same issue with iTunes disconnecting from HomePod and Apple TV. I found that with TVOS 10.2.2 doesn’t disconnect. I have been able to play music continuously for 24 hours. On another ATV I have installed TVOS 14 beta 6 and it still disconnects. Usually around the 30 second mark of a track. I believe the issue is with IOS. I have put in a ticket with Apple support. I hope the issue is resolved with IOS14 final version. If anybody has the same issue please take the time to call into support so that it gets addressed.

This is very, very interesting. On Mac you can communicate with iTunes programmatically via AppleScript. On the PC, a running instance of iTunes can be controlled with a COM interface that it exposes.

I do have experience working with the COM interface on Windows. And the main volume is exposed as something you can control. I'm going to try and work with it tonight and see if I can't come up with a little background app that can automatically change the volume 1% up down and up.

Thanks again, Bumbeen for your work and communication with Apple.

I got a small proof of concept Windows app written. It sends 1% volume change to iTunes every 20 seconds. Then it waits 1.5 seconds before setting the volume back to the original value. The 1.5 seconds between changes is there to give iTunes time to notify AirPlay outputs and the iOS iTunes Remote app that there was an actual volume change. It may not be needed. But superstition.

And with a 1% change, you can't even tell anything happened with the volume.

I listen to radio stations via iTunes on my PC. I then push the audio via AirPlay all over the house throughout the day. And both the HomePod and AppleTV audio will cut out periodically. It sucks.

So I will let iTunes try to pump music to the HomePod all night with this little app running. If the HomePod is still cranking out music in the morning I will be thrilled.

But yeah, Apple should be fixing this in the low level networking stack.

That's the exact use case I have. iTunes plays a stream and airplays it out to my homepods. I do this solely so that I can have EQ control over the audio. I'm in a teeny tiny apartment and the homepods just blast bass straight through the walls and I can't use apple music streaming direct to homepod because of it. Even the iphone bass reducer EQ is not enough. I have to turn the low end ALLLL the way down in itunes to make it manageable. It's ridiculous there's no EQ option on homepods after all this time.

Bumbeen - I think you hit the nail on the head with your packet analysis and automated volume change work around.

I left my prototype auto-volume adjusting app running over night and iTunes never disconnected from the HomePod. I came down to the kitchen this morning and the HomePod was still cranking out the music. The iTunes to HomePod connection has now been stable for about 16 hours. I can safely say this is the absolute longest my HomePod has ever played music.

I still need to do more testing and work on the app. I'm curious if it fixes the same issue I'm having AirPlaying to an Apple TV 4.

Did you hear back from Apple on your support ticket?

Haven't heard anything of substance from them. Just "waiting on a response from engineering".

Glad to hear it worked! I left mine running all night as well and homepods were still trucking when I woke up this morning.

The obvious conclusion we can draw from this experiment is that Apple simply doesn't test iTunes against new versions of homepod iOS. Super lame. I would not be surprised in the slightest if it fixes the apple TV issue as well.

Thanks Bryan and Bumbeen. I too ran Bumbeen's script all night and did not have the speaker stop once. Unfortunately I can't run it all the time because I don't have an extra laptop to use it on (just the one PC to work with).

I'd be interested in helping test as well Bryan, if you need it.

I seem to have overcome a related "connection" problem with my Homepods by giving them each a static IP address in my router's settings. Same for my Apple TV. Dynamic IPs might be confusing the system.

This is just fantastic. I strongly believe you have found the root cause. Its concerning and embarrasing that Apple has let this bug exist for so long, and so far has refused to acknowledge. This is what is a real investigation. I have started doubting if Apples engineers are capable of this level of debugging (or interested in doing so). Thanks a lot. I had gone crazy debugging this at various levels and had settled on to write a Powershell script (which didnt work). You have given me hope!

I have expereienced this issue for over a year now, I caved in a contacted Apple about it in January of this year, spent a long time doing free troubleshooting for Apple, the issue was never resolved, I contacted them again yesterday to be informed that they wont be doing anything to resolve this issue as they dont deem it as affecting many people, as I was apparently the only one to report this.

Its extremely infuriating, I have stuck with Itunes for years and built up a huge libary of music, and I dont want to switch to spotify, because of this. I work from my Windows 10 PC everyday and airplay to my homepod stero pair as well as having audio output from my soundbar, it sounds incredible when its working, but every 5/10/15 minutes it will cut out and is actually pretty disorienting.

The most embarasing thing for apple about this issue is that I am able to aiplay to any 'non-apple' airplay enabled speaker without issue. However Apple heavily suggested on the phone that it is an issue with Windows 10 and it will be hard to do anything to solve it.

After struggling with this issue for a year I finally gave up and have ordered Sonos One bundle to replace my homepods in the office, but to make matters worse, apple wont allow me to return the Homepods that are essentially 'broken' in my personal use case and the reason I purchased them in the first place as this feature was advertised.

This is my first bad experience with Apple, when you buy an apple product you expect it to work, and I expected that Apple would do all they could in order to fix this bug but just seemed uninterested, left a bad taste in my mouth.

I think the only way this will get resolved is if as many people phone in to report the bug as possible. But I would have expected more from apple.

Its great to see that the community has found the issue!

Hi guys.

I can't tell you how happy I am to have found this thread today!

I have been having this exact problem for well over 1 year now, and has been infuriating.

I have reported this multiple times to Apple, and I receive the same response as a previous person mentioned: "This is so surprising... this is the first time we are hearing about this." It's such bullcrap.

Over the past year I have spent so many hours trying to debug this on my own, and nothing would solve it.

As mentioned, it started to occur with one of the iOS 13 releases (13.4 I guess). At first, it only affected my Windows 10 iTunes streaming to my Apple TVs, which would then cut out randomly. Then, a couple months later, there was a HomePod update which then suddenly caused the same problems with iTunes streaming to the HomePods as well.

I've found multiple threads about this topic over the past year, but there was never any resolution.

Today I started playing with it again, determined to finally figure it out. And, this is when I realized that although it is randomly happening (sometimes just 2 songs may play, another time 6 or 7 songs may play)... the cutout ALWAYS happens at almost exactly 30 seconds into a random song. I'm not sure how I didn't see this pattern before.

This is when I did a new web search on "iTunes Airplay cutout 30 seconds" and finally stumbled upon this thread which I hadn't seen before.

So... I'm happy to at least know someone has figured out the root cause, and I can finally stop driving myself crazy trying to troubleshoot it. :-)

Of course, I'm guessing Apple will still never actually fix the problem, since they couldn't care less about Windows iTunes any longer. They don't seem to realize that there are thousands of people that still prefer to stream their music to all their Airplay devices from their main laptop and large monitor.

Bryan... is it possible for me to try out your app?

It is funny you brought this up - I just wrote out a To Do list that includes testing with the latest versions of the iTunes, tvOS and HomePod 14.1 that Apple just pushed out. I want to put the testing results up on the informational web site.

As you pointed out, I don't think it is fixed. I suspect it is something as simple as someone changed the "keep alive" expected timing parameter in tvOS (which runs both HomePod & ATV) and did not make the same change in iTunes for Windows.

If Apple can update iTunes on Windows for new iPhone models, they can certainly look into this timing issue. I'm trying to figure out a way to get their attention on this without spending hours on the phone. I just don't have that type of time to kill!

I also saw that Reddit post about audio quality post 14.1 update. There is always something with these updates.... -- B