Homepod disconnects or stops playing music from itunes randomly

@bassamu

Just email him, his email in a previous post

But here...

bryan dot kinkel@ gmail

Works here: See Change HomePod settings - Apple Support and try turning Hey Siri off and then back on again.

tt2

Brand new HomePod with latest iOS. Streaming to the HomePod via iTunes on a fresh, fully updated Windows 10 machine.

The HomePod is on the 5GHz band of an Apple AirPort Extreme.

Not that it matters, but we bought the HomePod to replace an old AirPlay 1 Panasonic system. Better sound and hopefully more reliable.

Not so. The HomePod stops playing at random. We stream music around the house 24 hours a day. But the random halting is killing me.

Next step is to disable the 5 GHz band and see if that works.

@Vancouver22

Then, that, my kind sir, is the declaration of a serious bug. When the algorithm deciding which source it will use cannot adequately make a decision of which to use and disconnects because of that inability... that is an issue.

My iPhone and iPad do not do this... they do not waffle. Otherwise I would have called Apple about that issue long ago.

This is, indeed, a firmware issue....

I have removed all other devices besides my iDevices from my network and the Homepod still disconnects about 00:28 into a song. The Homepod is also within 5' to 10' of the router, as well.

Most peculiarly, the Airport Express does not do this. It connects and plays reliably.

Ah, well!

The 13.4.8 update for HomePod that was just released yesterday does nothing to address the iTunes Windows > AirPlay > HomePod disconnect issue.

Left it playing internet radio overnight, came down this morning and the HomePod was disconnected as usual.

So disappointing.

I’ve done this with mine.You can still always use your 5G. its there but it just can’t be the default one it always goes to. They just get separated into their own bands and not set up as Dual Band. The lower speed is better at going through walls. The speed becomes irrelevant because if the wifi goes off for a brief moment as it’s trying to communicate, it’s just off. This seems to be when it loses a connection when it’s trying to establish communication at that very moment. Wifi cuts out all the time, it’s just the nature of how it works.

This is EXACTLY what's happening with my homepod, and my iPhone and my Windows iTunes (and probably my mac as well)

Thought i was going absolutely crazy, have you seen any improvements from disabling one of the radios in your router?

Well, sorry, it worked before! No connectionproblems. Apple ruined it, so it is Apple to fix it! The question to me is, why do all the musicfiles downloaded from Apple work properly and why some (not all) albums copied to the mac don't? I'm really ****** off....

its also happen to me in an iMac 27' on OS10.12.6 play one song and disconnect, I have a very strong mesh with a Time Machine as main router on 2.4 and 5Ghz and also 3 Airport express with airplay2 I think is an iTunes problem

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.

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.

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?

I agree with Turingtest2

When mine updated, I experienced several glitches and unexpected behaviors… I simply needed to get into my home app and make sure my devices were on the same Wi-Fi network…

Gave it about five minutes and it was working

So the first post from Mar 26, 2020 perfectly sums up the issue, and its now Nov 27, 2020 and the problem is still here. I have two homepods both running 14.2 and a 4k Apple TV also running 14.2. I have a brand new Windows 10 PC running 10.0.019041 and have just installed iTunes 12.11.0.26. Running any music lists from my phone works perfectly (as its handing off the list to the Homepod/TV which is then streaming from the internet direct to itself so totally disproves any issues with wifi), but whenever I stream from my PC the speakers will randomly disconnect/reconnect/disconnect etc etc. I was about to purchase some homepod mini's for other rooms in the house, but at this rate I'm seriously thinking of dumping them and getting a sono's which I know works flawlessly. I love my Apple speakers but it MUST work with iTunes as intended and as supported by the software.

Before anyone asks, yes, I've been through all the stages of switching things off, rebooting etc, etc. The fact that the speakers work flawlessly over wifi when communicating directly to the internet tells me there's nothing wrong with the wifi. They can play all day long with zero issues like that. Its only when you try to stream from your iTunes computer does it keep disconnecting/reconnecting.