Apple’s Music continues to confound me. I have a large playlist which I primarily play on my phone but occasionally elsewhere. Today I went to my playlist and hit play - it began playing where I’d left off - the last 15 seconds of a song (Foo Fighters Walk for those curious).
There is a HomePod Mini in this room so I navigate the Music app and select the HomePod. After about 45 minutes I click stop, walk out and do other stuff.
I decide to go for a walk. I open the Music app on my phone, click play and lo and behold it starts playing the last 15 seconds of the Foo Fighters - completely ignoring me having played through more than 45 minutes of music.
I have no idea if this is intentional behaviour but it sure was unexpected. Apple’s entire Music system is clumsy and confused - it was much simpler when we had iTunes and syncing.
Anyone know why it chooses to ignore almost an hour of playing - all on the same phone.
I have nothing to suggest. But what you describe is one of the reasons that I maintain my iTunes library on several older Macs that still use iTunes rather than Music.
I don’t have a HomePod, but you did this navigating on the same iPhone you later took on the walk?
If so, the behavior would be odd. But if it was on a different device, it sounds like the syncing of what you played didn’t happen before you switched devices.
Yep, same phone. I did it again this morning as a test and it did exactly the same thing. Ignored the hour or so I played through the HomePod and reverted to last thing out of the phone speakers.
It may be a ‘feature’, but it’s very odd and illogical.
When you start playing music on an iPhone and then use Airplay to have it play on a Homepod, you can end up in two possible modes:
Homepod (actually the name of the Homepod) or
iPhone->Homepod
In the first mode, the Homepod is operating independently of the iPhone; in the second, the iPhone is in control and just sending its audio to the Homepod. So, in the first case, making changes on the iPhone have no effect on the Homepod. I haven’t fgured out how to force one state versus the other.
I have a routinge for going to sleep where I start a playlist on my iPhone and use Airplay to direct the output to a Homepod Mini by my bed. I also place the phoen on a magsafe charger near my bed in standby mode. As I turn iin, I want to turn down the music volume and also have it stop after 30 minutes. When the Homepod is operating independently, sometimes it doesn’t resposd to the Siri commenads because the iphone picks them up instead. In that case, I usually lay the iPhone face down on the bedstand and re-issue the command.
Interesting. So maybe in the first case, HomePod runs like ChromeCast and fetches the audio directly over the Net rather than proxied through the iPhone?
In that case, perhaps HomePod has options like I pasted earlier that allow its play history to sync over iCloud, solving this issue?
The latter is how I use it - definitely the phone controlling the Homepod as I keep the phone nearby so I can control volume, skip or replay tracks etc.
Continuing my battle with Apple Music, yesterday I needed to work for a few hours so started the Music app on my phone and used Airplay to connect to a Homepod. After a while I wanted to hear a song again so picked up my phone and expected to be able to click the back button. Much to my surprise, the play button was showing the Play icon (indicating it was stopped) and neither the forward or back buttons would work.
I also noticed the Homepod was playing the song which was listed as ‘next song’ on my phone. I quit the Music app and the song kept playing. It seems somewhere along the line the Homepod took over from my phone - something I don’t want it to do. It appears another example of Apple trying to think for me instead of letting me control my life the way I want.
I’m actually pretty annoyed at this. I’m at the point I’m not going to use the Homepod anymore as I have some other wireless speakers I can use. I also hate the way Homepod chirps up sometimes when the TV says certain words.
