HomePod Late Adopter

Gosh. It is amazing how much of your experience mirrors our experience here at our home.

In the end, we did not return the HomePod mini and in fact added a second for the “stereo” functionality. It really is just for playing music by voice command and we still have two Echo devices in our home for everything else. I do have *hopes* that Apple will try to catch-up to the competition but like you, am pessimistic about it.

Thank you for publishing this. It was nice to have many of my own frustrations validated.

If you are subscribed to Apple Music/Apple One it includes Music Match.

"Part of my negativity is that I have no expectation that Apple will ever improve the experience with purchased or ripped/downloaded music. It’s all about getting you to subscribe to Apple Music now."

"I didn’t want to pay for iTunes Match"

My man, you overlooked the solution right there. Me and my 5,600+ album library with accurate metadata and artwork have had nary a problem with iTunes Match since it debuted yearsssss ago. You're obviously savvy enough to know to keep a separate copy of your music media, unsure what the concern would be with iTM "messing up your library". It would have easily fixed the 'Missing Purchased Music' section and you never would have had to write about it. Forgot what it costs nowadays but it's not more than $40/year, well worth it.

I do agree with the ghost taps though, I turned on the accessibility setting on the HomePod to prevent the taps but it disappoints me there's no way to reprogram what a tap on the HomePod does, I'd rather it just activate Siri.

Thanks for this detailed experience. I had been considering getting a HomePod 2 to replace at least one Echo. But even the music aspect seems suspect. I'll stick with Alexa for now.

@AS Why would iTunes Match fix a problem that only affects music I already purchased from Apple? Wouldn’t those songs not be matched in the first place?

Backing up the music media does not protect me from losing playlists or metadata that’s related to those files.

Dear Michael, I would not recommend you ever thinking about Apple Music. After many years of trying and suffering of data losses and turning my collection into a complete garbage, correcting it and suffering again and paying money for that, I must admit that I’ve been fooled and fooling myself. Music is obviously not their DNA, they stopped caring long time ago. It’s not to make you subscribing to Apple Music, they don’t care. No, iTunes Match won’t help you. It will chew all the metadata and spit out garbage. No, they won’t fix any issues. And we all know it.

I’ve been a subscriber to iTunes Match forever. Never had a problem with it and it has never messed up my files or metadata. My master library is on my Mac, about 15k songs I’ve ripped and added metadata. All my music appears on other Apple devices with zero problems, bough I can’t address if it works with a HomePod.

I stayed away from Apple Music forever but finally decided to try it about two years ago (after doing a final cleanup of my ripped library, backing it up in three places, and having a way to check its integrity). Been mostly ok and it hasn’t done any thing funny to my master library. I don’t add any tracks from Music to my library, though I suspect I could if I was careful.

Only had two real issues with Apple Music and how it interacts with my library. The first is that I have a lot of bootleg live concerts in my library. If I play one of those songs off the album (or from one of the ‘for you’ play lists), on my phone (and only my phone), if I have those live versions on the phone, it will usually play one of those live versions instead of the proper studio track. Seems to be matching only on artist and track title. Note if I go the album in my library tab it’s fine; it’s just playing from Apple Music.

The second issue is with tracks from Apple Music track that I have put on a playlist or favorited. I usually go purchase the music elsewhere as lossless and bring it in to my library. The aforementioned tracks usually have a problem with iTunes Match and don’t show up on my phone. Syncing my cloud library, deleting the offending tracks, then reimporting them fixes it. It is aggravating because I have to check each album I buy on my phone after importing, but it doesn’t really take long, and having my music everywhere with iTunes Match makes it worth it.

One thing I wish the HomePod Mini (and HomePod) had was a way to turn off the GLOWING LIGHT it has when playing any sound. Apple gives us these quiet soundscapes to help us get to sleep, then distracts our sleep with this dumb light.

As for playlists:

Even with iTunes Match, I too had to create iTunesStorePurchased playlists + AppleMusicTrialOnly playlists to play from when I'm not on an Apple Music trial. Otherwise, the Music app just stops playing (or plays a random song) when it hits a song you added from when you were an Apple Music subscriber.

@Michael Tsai

“Why would iTunes Match fix a problem that only affects music I already purchased from Apple? Wouldn’t those songs not be matched in the first place?”

Your issue with certain tracks being shown in your account as un-purchased is almost certainly a downstream effect of a rights/licensing issue. What likely happened is that Apple’s distribution rights for the song expired at some point in the past, causing the song to be unavailable for a time from the iTunes Store; once the rights were renegotiated/re-acquired, the song reappeared in the iTunes Store—but with a new unique ID unassociated with any previous purchases. I’ve seen the same thing happen both with movies purchased from the iTunes Store and with Apple Books—in fact, I’ve *re*-purchased (sometimes accidentally, sometimes deliberately) already purchased items due to this. (See the pending class action suit against Apple for revoking access to “purchased” iTunes Store media.)

Long story short: Because iTunes Match doesn’t care about *where* your music came from—matching it against whatever is currently in the iTunes Store catalog (usually, but not always, accurately, sometimes screwing up versions, etc.), uploading as an actual music file whatever *isn’t* in the catalog, and making it all available from the cloud—it effectively treats *all* of your music as “purchased” music (regardless of whether it was ever even purchased from iTunes to begin with). Thus, it should almost certainly solve your issues.

There are only two caveats (aside from the aforementioned issues with incorrect song version matching—which, by the way, you can sometimes fix by changing the track metadata to trick iTunes Match into realizing that it’s a different version):

1) I’ve rarely had weird issues related to albums comprising tracks from multiple sources being split in two or suffering other odd metadata-related conflicts—so the fact that you have albums composed of some “true” purchased tracks and some iTunes Match tracks *might* (but probably won’t) cause some issues; as a workaround, you might want to just hide all of your purchased music completely from within your iTunes account once enabling iTunes Match and rely on iTunes Match exclusively—I *think* that should work, but I’m not 100% sure.

2) You’ll want to make a full backup of your entire iTunes library folder (including all media files *and* the library file itself); this will save all of your music, your metadata, your playlists—everything. While iTunes Match generally seems to be pretty reliable, I *have* had several issues and some data loss over the years, especially when making changes to metadata of matched tracks (though this often seems to be compounded by a combined iTunes Match and Apple Music library—a circumstance that you won’t encounter). And if you ever stop paying for iTunes Match, be aware that your cloud library will go poof, so for that reason too, it’s crucial that you have a current local copy of your music library.

Overall, however, for $25/year, iTunes Match is a steal; I highly recommend it. (And as an added bonus, if you happen to have any songs in your library that were ripped or downloaded at a low bitrate, iTunes Match will give you a “free” permanent upgrade to a DRM-free 256 kpbs AAC Plus—again, as long as it matches to the correct version.)

“Backing up the music media does not protect me from losing playlists or metadata that related to those files.”

See above.

@Michael Tsai I forgot to add re: data loss with iTunes Match: Yes, I’ve also had playlists get corrupted or randomly deleted; but again, as long as you’ve followed my advice above about maintaining a local backup, anything that gets lost (once you notice it) should be able to be restored from a backup—though I’m not sure how easy it is to restore individual playlists; you might need to restore your whole library (and in doing so, might run into issues, as one often does with iCloud, convincing it to accept the new local library as the canonical truth).

@Jon I guess what you’re saying is that my “old” purchased version is likely to match the “new” version in the store and so won’t need to be uploaded? If this really is a lapsing rights issue, shame on Apple for not being able to figure that out quickly. And that should have been straightforward for them to solve automatically for everyone.

I’m sympathetic to bugs. They happen and can be hard to track down. But simply choosing not to handle a really obvious and common case is something else. Curiously, many of the affected albums have no reviews in the iTunes Store, which I don’t recall being the case at the time I purchased. So perhaps Apple’s associated data was lost in the renumbering, too. I wonder how much they’re making selling people the same albums multiple times.

Anyway, I have heard enough iTunes Match horror stories that I’m not going to take that risk. And I’m not going to pay Apple a subscription fee to access music that I already paid them for. In fact, I paid them a premium vs. Amazon or ripping CDs specifically so that I would have ongoing access via iCloud.

My complete shock upon buying and setting up a HomePod mini was that it isn't a Bluetooth speaker—it *only* supports AirPlay. AirPlay has an approximately two-second delay (supposedly deliberately for buffering purposes). This makes it out-of-sync when using it as an audio-out from a computer.

It kind of reminds me of that old joke where the programmers make toasters that get more and more complicated. I understand that the HomePod is not a speaker; it's a hub and an internet-capable streaming device. But that's no reason to not support the simple tasks as well.

I've read that one can use the HomePod to make phone calls, so apparently it has the ability to operate as a Bluetooth mic & speaker. But this functionality is limited to phone calls as far as I can tell. It would make so much sense to use this for teleconferencing, but the lag makes that impossible.

@Michael Tsai

“I guess what you’re saying is that my ‘old’ purchased version is likely to match the ‘new’ version in the store and so won’t need to be uploaded?”

Exactly.

“If this really is a lapsing rights issue, shame on Apple for not being able to figure that out quickly. And that should have been straightforward for them to solve automatically for everyone.”

Agreed. Lots (most?) of what Apple does these days seems to deserve some degree of shame. I’ve thought this through, and there is quite literally not a single task for which I use my Apple devices that is not touched, to some extent, by disruptive and obvious bugginess—ranging from glaring graphical glitches on the benign end to severe data loss or utter, outright, wholesale brokenness on the critical end. It’s become the exception, rather than the norm, for things to work at all—let alone to “just work.”

“Anyway, I have heard enough iTunes Match horror stories that I’m not going to take that risk. And I’m not going to pay Apple a subscription fee to access music that I already paid them for. In fact, I paid them a premium vs. Amazon or ripping CDs specifically so that I would have ongoing access via iCloud.”

Understood. If it’s an issue of principle, I get it. But if it’s over concern for your data, I’m not really sure that that’s fully rational, as there’s no harm in trying iTunes Match for a year if you have a local backup. (And in my opinion, while I would be loath to pay Apple a premium just to fix a problem that Apple caused—a ploy akin to the classic “Three Stooges” bit in which the Stooges seed a house with vermin only to show up at the door the next day selling their services as exterminators—iTunes Match offers enough of a value added proposition that it’s well worth the $25/year. Don’t forget, it makes your entire library, even tracks acquired elsewhere, available in the cloud—and thus on HomePod and the Music apps on all of your devices. And that’s not to mention the “free track upgrade” feature that I called out in my previous comment.)

@Keith I was wondering how it does phone calls since AirPlay is one-way. I accidentally switched a phone call from AirPods to HomePod once and couldn’t get it to switch back, as the iPhone somehow got locked on one screen so that I couldn’t access the audio control.

@Jon I think iTunes Match would be tempting if Siri worked better.

I haven't had these issues, but I've got both iTunes Match and Apple Music.

The issue I have had is more a Siri problem than a HomePod problem. Siri's ability to parse playlist names (and HomeKit device names, for that matter) is terrible, and it is easily confused if a user-created playlist/device name is similar to some other keyword that Apple has programmed.

For instance, I have a playlist named "Favorite Music." Asking Siri to "play my Favorite Music playlist" fails, because Siri decides "Favorite" is a keyword rather than the start of a playlist name. The workaround is (sadly) familiar to programmers: "Hey Siri, play my quote Favorite Music unquote playlist."

Or for HomeKit, I have a scene called "Dim" for my media room. At Christmastime, I wanted a separate scene so that "Dim" would have dim lighting but no Christmas tree (which reflects on the TV), and "Dim With Tree" would turn the tree on as well. With both scenes configured, Siri would only ever activate Dim. Asking "set the scene to Dim With Tree" would result in Dim being activated. Siri apparently only parses scene names until the least-greedy match. The solution was to rename "Dim With Tree" to "You Suck," so I could reliably activate that scene with "Hey Siri, set the scene to You Suck."

This issue affects all Siri-capable devices, not just the HomePod. But the HomePod doesn't have any way around them, because Siri is all you get.

As for transferring calls: if you're in a call, bringing your phone close to a HomePod for a few seconds will cause it to transfer the call to the HomePod, or vice-versa. It's more reliable if both devices support ultra-wideband Bluetooth (HomePod 2 and HomePod mini). If your HomePod is on your desk near where you charge or store your phone, it's easy to set this off by accident.

@Keith HomePod call support doesn't use standard Bluetooth protocols; I believe it's either a direct IP connection to your cell carrier (if supported) or a FaceTime Audio relay from your iPhone via Wi-Fi, just like how a Mac or iPad can receive audio from the iPhone. I believe Bluetooth is involved only for proximity detection and authentication.

Great review, thank you, that is very useful so that I do not even have to try it myself. I have my music collection, and I pay for iTunes match and do not want Apple Music, not because of the money, but because it will for sure degrade my music experience. And yes, I also do not hope that Apple will actually ever fix it. I hope it will be useful long enough until some other company offers an adequate replacement.

@Rob Do you mean that Siri understands “quote” and “unquote” to escape keywords or that you actually named your playlist “quote Favorite Music unquote” in the Music app?

@Michael Tsai I can only guess that it's using plain old Bluetooth to do this, but  doesn't seem to specify. They *do* say "To use these features, you need to set up your iOS or iPadOS device to make Personal Requests on HomePod," implying that once again MacOS has taken a back seat. Many of the web solutions for using a HomePod on a Mac Zoom call say to join the audio using your iPhone and then use Handoff. (Bleech!)

And yes the issue of "accidentally" doing things seems to be getting all-too-common. It is a difficult UX balance. You want the machine to be automatic and intuitive but you also want to give users options. Unfortunately, it appears that the needle is far to one side. The modern User Experience could very well be described as "Easy to do what MegaCorp wants me to do, but impossible to do what I want to do."

Ultimately, it’s just a disappointment. It is far too dependent on online services which do not work properly. In principle, it should be a conduit to Siri in much the same way that your phone is, and should give you access to the same power and content. In practice, of course, it’s nothing like that, and anything that is not an Apple first party service or feature is at a disadvantage or completely unsupported (and even Apple's own audiobooks don't work). This is in stark contrast to other Voice assistants, which have credible ecosystems through third party web services.

Agreed that iTunes Match is a partial remedy, albeit, with the caveats Jon notes. Use it responsibly and it can be useful. But, HomePod ought still to have support for Home Sharing or some other means to directly access media libraries on other Apple devices.

You can turn off the touchscreen and Hey Siri, use HomePod Mini as a home hub. So there's that.

@Michael Tsai I mean that, when you speak to Siri, it will convert the words "quote" and "unquote" to the equivalent punctuation, and it apparently then parses what you said using the quotes to help tokenize the input. So "Play my favorite music playlist" and "Play my 'Favorite Music' playlist" get interpreted differently by whatever is handling the text generated by Apple's speech-to-text engine. My guess is that "favorite" is a preprogrammed keyword, so if it's not quoted, it gets a special interpretation that's not sensible in my case.

@Rob Oh, that’s great, then.

Before you get a USB-C extension cable for power purposes, remember to double-check its ability to do carry more than 5V, it is never going to work as a power extension otherwise.

I am severely disappointed in the HomePod interface. I share your complaints about the Home app itself.

But playing things are so annoying. I wish I could use my phone to pick a song to play on the HomePod, instead I have to contort my words to get it to play. I wish I could pick a specific one to play that works.

And of course there are times where my AppleTV or iPhone will randomly connect to HomePods and start playing, and trying to get the phone interface to change the output is so difficult.

"Backing up the music media does not protect me from losing playlists or metadata that’s related to those files."

The 'Music Library' xml-ish file holds all of that playlist and metadata information... I'm going to assume that comment was an April Fools joke.

"Music is obviously not their DNA, they stopped caring long time ago. It’s not to make you subscribing to Apple Music, they don’t care. No, iTunes Match won’t help you. It will chew all the metadata and spit out garbage. No, they won’t fix any issues. And we all know it."

My typical music purchasing approach is buying 20-30 albums digitally off Bandcamp every couple of months, just did it as recently as last Wednesday to be honest. Added the albums in bulk to the MacOS music app, spent ~20 minutes polishing the metadata and spot-checking the album art (BC is very consistent with album art so that check is instantaneous). I don't even have to hit 'Update Genius' for the post-metadata edit files to be uploaded shortly after to my iCloud Music Library and because my iPhone is set to automatically download new Music added to the library, I was literally set for the weekend with new tunes locally downloaded on my 256 GB XS with absolutely minimal effort. With the iCloud Music Library, my ~49,000 song library is streamable anywhere from my iOS devices and downloading locally saves me for the incredibly rare moments where cell service let me down (e.g., rural Wyoming).

"But my goal is to avoid AirPlay where possible and have the HomePod play most music directly."

I only found this out recently due to a family sharing Apple One subscription that gave me Apple Music for the first time ever-- if Apple Music has what you're trying to stream (matching from your library), it'll directly stream it to the HomePod allowing your iOS device to still play different media. Not the case without Apple Music, you'll have to Airplay from the device on-hand.

"There’s a setting in iOS called Siri ‣ Accessibility ‣ Spoken Responses ‣ Prefer Silent Responses, but this only seems to affect my phone, not HomePod."

Depending on the action, I enabled this setting and home automation commands just give a blip noise coming from my HomePod.

"Multiple devices are a problem because Siri doesn’t always know which one I’m talking to. There doesn’t seem to be a way to say “Hey, HomePod” to disambiguate. It’s supposed to be automatic but often chooses incorrectly."

Haven't had this problem with my 2 iOS devices/HomePod in my 700 sq ft apartment for home automation commands (only time I use Siri).

I'm also marveled at the vast amount of comments here who are insistent on only operating the HomePod via Siri. I've never once tried to rely on it to play music I want. My library tends to have a lot of non-english words/artists/album titles that my dumbass American self would mispronounce so I just select the music to play via screen.

"I wish I could ask Siri which albums or artists are available, but that doesn’t seem to be possible."

I've pondered on this functionality for a while and I'm not sure it's good UX to receive an audio response to my query "Hey Siri, what Rush albums do I have in my library?" and having it audibly speak out 19 album titles while I'm sitting waiting to interrupt it when it hits the title I feel like spinning. (What if I asked for the Arckanum albums in my library, how would Siri verbalize their 2009 album 'ÞÞÞÞÞÞÞÞÞÞÞ'?) This is where maybe the use of AR glasses would come into play and Siri would respond to this request with a visual response to this query and list out the albums I own from the artist.

"The listening history could have been a great feature, with integration across multiple Apple devices"

Again, only know this as of very recently but with Apple Music subscription, there's an accurate, integrated listening history across all my MacOS & iOS devices.

"I wonder how much they’re making selling people the same albums multiple times."

I've only had purchased iTunes Music Store file issues for purchased music prior to 2008. Everything afterwards has been fine over the years but I won't say I didn't have any issues at all.

With all this being said, my music listening experience isn't all sunshine and happiness, most notably I'm still dealing with an inoperable bug (silent failing of course) where my M1 Mini cannot airplay from the Music App to the HomePod. Been this way since I got the M1 in December of 2020 practically and while recent 16.4 releases of iOS and HomePodOS did fix it a little to where it actually worked this past week for the first time ever, it just broke again today for some reason and my only real tangible fix is restarting the M1 Mini.

Oh, another obnoxious issue I have with music-- since the feature debuted on iOS YEARS ago, I have always had the 'Optimize Storage' functionality enabled but it has NEVER EVER EVER worked. Updating the iPad to iOS 16 last year was a pain in the ass because the installer wouldn't fit due to local storage being full and the iPad was insisting on trying to offload apps (and failing, offloading was buggy and not working correctly) instead of relying on the 'Optimize Music Storage' which I had enabled to 16 GB (downloaded music on that iPad was sitting at 30-40 GB at the time of troubleshooting) and I had to manually delete all the music at once for the installation to work. If THAT wasn't the most opportune time for the setting to work, I don't know what is. If anyone here has ever seen the functionality actually work, please let me know. Last time I checked when I mentioned this bug to Apple a few years ago, their only solution was factory restore, which didn't seem that helpful.

@AS Apple itself says that the XML file only contains “some” of the metadata. It does include playlist information, but it’s not clear to me whether the Import Playlist command would work with that if the files got messed up. For example, if Music changed the metadata, and then the files got moved because I had the library set to be “organized,” then both the paths and metadata would be different from what’s in the old XML file, so I don’t see how it would be able to match up the songs.

I wouldn’t always want it to list all the albums, but it would be nice as an option. Currently, it doesn’t even work to ask for a random album by Rush. I either have to know the exact one that I want or pick it manually on my iPhone. With the latter, it will AirPlay so that it will tie up my phone and also stop playing if I leave the home unless I hand it off back to the HomePod (which hasn’t worked that reliably). Also, the listening history doesn’t work as well with other devices when using AirPlay.

The albums that were inaccessible include purchases as recent as 2016.

Music at Apple is such a disaster now. I don't like subscriptions for anything either and I think curating playlists for myself is a hassle. So I bought a Raspberry Pi with an audio board ("HAT") and play only Fip Radio streams which are great, varied and ad-free.