HomePod Homepods auto-grouping overnight

[blaizefm]

As the title says, I have three Homepods in my home that have this somewhat annoying glitch where they seem to want to huddle together in groups. Sometimes all of them are grouped, sometimes just a couple.

So, go to bed at night: all ungrouped. Wake up (but not every day, so is inconcistent) and they are all over the shop. Cue hilarity when folks start to play music in each room.

Anyone else having this experience? It’s quite disappointing, seeing as I came from a Sonos set-up where this kind of problem never happened.

Updated to 13.4 etc.

Ta

 

[Itinj24]

Yep. I posted about this a few weeks ago. Got woken up in my bedroom when my wife played music in the kitchen. They are ungrouped in the Home app. I played around with this and noticed that if you ask the HomePod to play music in that specific room, it won’t play on multiple HomePods. For instance, “Hey Siri, play music in the KITCHEN”. This started with the 13.3.1 update for me IIRC.

 

[blaizefm]

Great idea regarding the “Hey Siri, play music in the KITCHEN”. Works fine. Annoying that I have to do it, but if that’s the least of my problems at the moment I’ll be happy.

 

[blaizefm]

Right, so I manage to identify the problem with this, and naturally it is user error.

I had created a Goodnight scene in the Home app, which turned off all the lights and stopped the music on all the speakers. This command to stop all speakers put them all in the same group.

I’m not sure why sending this command would trigger this behaviour (why it couldn’t just stop each speaker in turn rather than grouping them together, then stopping the group instance) but at least I can turn off the scene and not have the confusion in the morning.

 

[Itinj24]

Ah interesting... I have them both in a scene together but for what’s it’s worth, it’s a security scene where they play an alarm sound and (knock on wood) it hasn’t been triggered with the automation. I’ll do some more testing.

 

[CoachDriver]

I experienced the same thing with 3 Sonos speakers. I had them in an automation to stop playing when I left home.

Since removing this about 2 weeks ago the issue went away.

So don’t think it is specific to the HomePod but rather the automation creating a group even if no speakers are grouped.