I can add the Airport Express to my Home app, I can play music from my iPhone Music app, but I cannot control the Airport Express from my Home app as a Homekit speaker, and it doesn't show in my destinations in the Music app to control it seperately. I tried everything. Any suggestions?
THNX
I am assuming that you have the 2nd generation AirPort Express model and it is running either 7.8 or 7.8.1 firmware ... and it is configured to join the wireless network provided by your wireless mesh system ... correct?
If so, then we see numerous posts here with the inconsistency of these versions of firmware and the only "solution" would be to downgrade it back to 6.9 or 6.8. However, as you know, that would disable AirPlay 2 capability and defeat the use for your situation. As you also know, Apple abandoned the AirPort base stations over two years ago. At some point this Express is going to fail and you will need to find another solution. To date, there are no direct replacements for it.
Going back to the issue at hand, I can still suggest a few things you can try:
From my experience, I have found the AirPlay 2 update, that Apple provided in 7.8 & 7.8.1, to be "flaky" at best, or completely non-functional. I have done numerous data captures of AirPlay sessions between a variety of devices to these base stations (with both 7.8 & 7.8.1) and found them either not being able to establish a connection, not being able to maintain that connection, for even if they are maintained, poor streaming quality. Nothing that I tried would remedy this, including having the base station connected by wireless or via a wired connection. I wish I could be more positive about my experience, but this hasn't changed since Apple introduced the 7.x firmware a few years back.
Everything means everything. The usual suspects. It worked before, have no idea what changed. I restarted the modem, the mesh wifi, the airport express, the homekit hubs. Then I restored the Airport Express to its factory settings, reset it. It joins the network with Airplay enabled. The Home app finds it. I can add it to the Home. I can open it in the Home app, but it says "Controls unavailable for this device". I can use it as Airplay to stream music to my speaker, but it stops workin as a Homekit Airplay 2 speaker.
Hope it is enough info to access your wisdom.
Yes, I have second generation Airport Express (A1392), 7.8.1 firmware. It joins my network. After the reset, the first thing I had to do, is to set the IPv6 to local only, otherwise it returns an error "lost DNS server" over and over again.
I know the Airport Express is discontinoued, I have a Homepod which works just perfect, but it is nice to have one more reliable Airplay 2 speaker in the kitchen for example. It was the case until today.
My mesh is a Linksys Velop tri-band system, and my Homepod works just fine, so for now, I am out of ideas.
It would help immensely if you let us know what "I tried everything" included BEFORE we try offering you potential solutions to try to resolve this.
Airport Express Airplay 2 in Home app not working
