Level 1

18 points

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

So I have a HomePod in my study and my wife has one in her study. Although we share an Apple account, her HomePod was set up on her iPhone and mine on my iPhone.

We can both see the HomePods in our Home apps.

They're not stereo paired as we use them independantly but currently if I ask Siri to play music on my HomePod, it pauses whatever is playing on my wife's HomePod, and vice versa.

Any ideas why this is happening and how to stop it?

HomePod, iOS 12

Posted on Sep 27, 2018 8:37 AM

Top-ranking reply

veliusvayne87

Level 1

4 points

Posted on Nov 27, 2018 1:43 PM

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.

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21 replies

Nov 27, 2018 3:02 PM in response to veliusvayne87

I spoke too soon... it broke again and won't let me play 2 separate apple music streams on the homepods

Jan 12, 2019 8:07 PM in response to Twitchly

I can confirm that i have been facing similar issues. If I am playing a song on iPad and want to play something else on the HomePod it doesnt work anymore.

Jan 13, 2019 1:47 PM in response to Tron_85

Hi Tron, can you post official apple proof of what you just said? That someone in car can be listening to music concurrently someone at home playing songs with homepod ?

turingtest2

Level 10

278,119 points

Sep 27, 2018 9:46 AM in response to fatboyslick

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

Tron_85

Level 1

4 points

Oct 28, 2018 1:35 AM in response to fatboyslick

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

Jan 16, 2019 1:38 AM in response to fatboyslick

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.

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