Homepod only appears in airplay after a hard reset

I've left replies on other threads about this, thought I'd try again here.

I'm on my second HP- Returned the first one last week for this issue: After a day or two... or three, HP no longer shows up in my Sound Preferences as an option to play to. Nor does it show up in Airplay, again, only after a few days. A hard reset always works, but this can't be normal.

Was told my first one may have had some transmission issue, and since they can't do diagnostics on these things, they just exchanged it. Worked great for about 5 days. As of yesterday, it no longer shows up as an option.

Is there a way manually pair this device? Waiting for it to show up in the Sound Preferences isn't doing it.

Airplay works great for AppleTV, so I know it works.

Streaming from the phone does work, but I don't want to listen that way.

On a 2014 Macbook Pro, all up to date.

Anybody have any suggestions? Do I go in and swap this one out as well?

It could be your router.

Which options do you have for speaker access?

• Everyone
• Anyone On the Same Network
• Only People Sharing This Home
• Require Password

When you say hard reset do you mean a power cycle, or a full reset and set up of the HomePod? Have you reset the router too? Have you considered assigning fixed IP addresses for the components of the network? Do your wireless devices have the credentials for more than one network visible in your location?

tt2

A combined wireless router modem then. See Guest accounts and wireless isolation in case anything there resonates. You could see if using the Everyone and Require Password options allows AirPlay to work more reliably.

tt2

Hi, try this, in your iTunes on your Mac look for the Airplay icon, top left ( might be Orange ), click on it and in the drop down you should see 2 tick boxes ( Computer and HomePod ), make sure both are ticked then see what happens !

Steve

Are you using the same Apple ID for cloud services, i.e. Home setup, and for iTunes/Apple Music? What options are you using under Change AirPlay Settings as shown in Change settings for HomePod - Apple Support? Everyone and Require Password should allow peer to peer AirPlay connections which might be more reliable than your current Wi-Fi router or access point.

tt2

Thanks for the quick reply!

Yes, I use one Apple ID for Cloud, iTunes, multiple devices-

In the HP settings, I turned on Require Password, then restarted everything. Once I entered the password per the prompt (on the computer), it's now showing up as a Sound option! Great!

Hopefully this solves the problem! Unfortunately I won't know for a few days... haha, but it seems to make sense to not have the home router/modem as an access point.

Thanks for the tip! I hope other people see it as well.

You're welcome. Hope it holds out for you. 🙂

tt2

Me too! Thanks again.

I'll also post this on the other thread I was posting to-