Music stops playing on one HomePod when a second Homepod is asked to play music (not stereo paired)

From Apple’s web site: “When you add HomePod to multiple rooms, the speakers communicate with each other through AirPlay. So you can ask Siri to play jazz in the living room and the Moana soundtrack in the kids’ room — or to play the same song everywhere in the house — all from where you’re standing.” https://www.apple.com/homepod/

FWIW, I’m having no trouble playing 2 different songs on 2 HomePods, plus a third song on my iPhone (on and off WiFi) all at the same time. All are under a single iCloud account. I’m running iOS 12.1.2. I have an Apple Music subscription along with a lot of purchased music.

I may have found a solution while tinkering with router settings.

Here are the steps:

• I went into my router settings and assigned each homepod a static IP address.
• After doing this, I rebooted my router and modem. I noticed shortly after that the homepods were showing a huge delay in answering requests (Siri would often say "just a moment", "still working on it") and viewing each homepod in the Home app of my iPhone was severely delayed/laggy. Sometimes Siri would just fail to perform the request after waiting for a long while. That said, even as slow as it was, I was able to eventually get Siri to play separate Apple Music streams by requesting a different song on each homepod.
• I decided the delay/lag was unacceptable, so I unassigned the static IP addresses in my router settings and removed both homepods from my iPhone Home.
• I power cycled each homepod
• I went back through the set up steps of adding each homepod to my iPhone Home app as I did when I received them new.
• From my Living room, I asked Siri to play some Jazz in the Living room and verified that music began to play on the Living room homepod
• From my Living room, I asked Siri to play some Rock in the Bedroom and verified that music began to play on the Bedroom homepod while music did not cease to play on the Living room homepod
• I asked Siri what was playing in the living room, and then asked Siri what was playing in the bedroom to verify that each was a different song

I tested it about 4 or 5 times and verified that I was able to play a different song from Apple Music on each homepod. I also verified that I was able to play the same song at the same time on each homepod. I did notice when both homepods were playing the same song, and then I asked Siri to "play jazz in the Living room", the music would stop in the bedroom... but that seems to work correctly as the homepods are likely un-pairing from the same stream in the control center. If I follow up with "play rock in the bedroom", the Living room continues to play jazz while the bedroom begins playing rock. Perhaps some issue with the IP addresses was tricking Apple Music into believing that each homepod was the same address or same unit.

The issue with the volume control continues to persist though. I am still unable to use siri to control the volume of each homepod in their respective rooms but am able to get her to control the volume of the homepod in the other room.

You can only run one stream from Apple Music at a time. You can potentially route that stream to multiple computers. If you AirPlay downloaded content from different computers or devices you should be able to listen to different things at the same time.

tt2

You're right, I recall reading the tweet about that at the time. Just clutching for a possible explanation. I've even made a point of testing it myself at some point. Not at home right now but I'll split my stereo pair later and have another go to see if anything has changed there.

tt2

Hey there,

I also have the exact same problem as you. I also have an Apple Music Single Person Plan, so no Family Plan. Is there any solution right now you can provide for me or do you also facing the problem at the moment? Do you have contacted Apple about this problem?

Maybe they changed the option for Single Person Plans. As I have read in an Apple Support Document you can hear Music with your iPhone in the car and also another person can hear music with the HomePod at home with the Single Person Plan. This is also working for me. But I did not read anywhere what is about two HomePods at the same time at home. Did you find anything about that? I will not rule out they changed the behavior. Otherwise I could get an unlimited amount of HomePods for my family and they could hear all Apple Music with my Single Person Plan if my Apple ID is used for all of them.

Do you maybe have switched to Family Plan and have any news on that?

Thank you very much.

Best regards,

Tron_85

Any updates or resolutions to this issue?

I just purchased 2 HomePods during the Black Friday sales and I am experiencing the same issue on a single Apple Music plan with both HomePods linked to one account. I have one HomePod in my living room and one in my bedroom. When asking Siri to play music in the living room, then asking Siri to play music in the bedroom, the music in the living room pauses. Same thing happens vice versa as well.

I have also noticed that when I ask Siri to change the volume on the HomePod (where I am currently present), she will say she cannot do that and to try again later, but if I ask her to change the volume on the HomePod in the other location, she performs it perfectly fine.

I switched back to an older router (ASUS RT-AC66U) from my current router (NETGEAR XR500) and I haven't had the problem with playing different music on each homepod from Apple Music.

Volume control via Siri still doesn't work properly most of the time

Did anyone find a solution to this? I have two homepods in two different rooms. Both would play independently of each other when asked. Now one will play and the other will pause if playing something different. Very annoying. Any help?

Just started experiencing this issue today. We have 5 HomePods in our office, and everyone is usually playing their own music. All the HomePods were purchased by me and share my Apple Music account. We've been working all weekend, and yesterday everything was fine, but since we arrived this morning no two HomePods will play simultaneously. As soon as one HomePod starts to play, all others pause. Nothing has changed on our network, nothing has changed on my Apple ID, and nothing has changed in our use of the HomePods, certainly not since yesterday.

I reset my homepod last week and today I experienced the same problem.

When I bought the homepod in December I could play different music on my iPhone while my Homepod was playing over my same apple ID.

So I called apple today and the employee told me that there would have been a bug which gave me the opportunity to play on both devices at the same time which has been fixed by apple so that one can only play on one device at the same time.

But there was no iOS Update since my

last usage of both devices at once, so is he mistaken and it‘s a bug that i can‘t play at both devices at the same time or is he right? I mean, if my wife is at home and wants to listen to music and I am not home, we can‘t stream music at the same time. This *****.

Is anyone else experiencing the same Problem?

That Apple employee is wrong. Being able to play different music on different HomePods is listed by Apple as a feature in their marketing. So if it’s not working, there’s a bug.

I haven’t tested that feature recently, but I am experiencing the same problem others have mentioned about not being able to control the volume of the HomePod that’s in the same room with me. In particular, I can ask my kitchen HP to tell me what volume is playing in the living room and get an answer. But if I ask the kitchen HP for its own volume level, it tells me “Sorry, try again later.” I tried unplugging it and then doing a full reset, but the problem persists. I sent a bug notice to Apple, for whatever good that will do.

I have noticed this recently when playing music on my HomePod at the same time playing music on my iPhone. Although I'm not actually 'streaming' music on my iPhone, but playing 'downloaded' music while commuting on the train. Both signed on to a single user Apple Id Music licence.

My iPhone's music is a mixture of songs from Apple's Music catalogue, and purchased music (CDs or purchased downloads) matched to songs in Apple's Music catalogue.

I understand that Apple have reported that the ability until now to play different songs simultaneously was a bug, which they have now closed, and that the marketing literature was in error reporting what was possible, which should not have been possible.

I could understand Apple interpreting music downloaded from Apple Music was deferred streaming, but not my songs uploaded and matched.

It would seem expensive to upgrade to a family-plan for just 2 people whose playing of songs separately happened only occasionally.

An update.

My music library contains a mix of matched and uploaded songs.

If I am streaming something to my HomePod, and I am simultaneously playing on my iPhone a matched or uploaded song, there is no problem.

If however I start streaming something to my iPhone that I do not 'own' while I am simultaneously streaming to the HomePod, the HomePod gets interrupted, and vice versa.

So I think it is a recent server change which checks if the song about to be streamed is owned or 'borrowed', and if that AppleId is already streaming something 'borrowed'.