HomePod can play all music but does not recognize Playlists, Artist, etc.

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Level 1

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HomePod can play all music but does not recognize Playlists, Artist, etc.

Hi. I have an iTunes Match subscription and have all my music synced. I do not have Apple Music subscription. I got a HomePod recently and was able to give it voice command to play music by genre, artists, playlists etc.

But something changed over the last couple of days where the HomePod can “play all songs shuffled”, but is unable to find playlists, artists, etc.

I have tried all the standard troubleshooting steps: reset the device, take it off and on the network, signed out and back in, etc. Nothing worked.

The operating system has been updated since I first installed it, and I am wondering if that messed something up.

Since it seems that the metadata are missing, I am wondering about turning of sync and then re-sync. I am wondering if that would allow all the metadata to be re-synced. It would take a long time as I have 140G music to be rematched and reuploaded. So I thought would check here to see if anyone has tried that before I give it a go.

Any other ideas would be appreciated.

TIA

HomePod

Posted on Apr 4, 2025 03:17 PM

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Answer 1

turingtest2

Level 10

277,723 points

Apr 5, 2025 06:40 AM in response to agchan

Have you turned on Recognize My Voice? This seems to break compatibility with iTunes Match cloud music libraries. See Set up voice recognition on HomePod or HomePod mini - Apple Support for details of how to turn it on/off.

tt2

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Answer 2

agchan Author

Level 1

8 points

Apr 6, 2025 12:02 PM in response to turingtest2

Thanks for the advice. I did not turn on the voice recognition feature because only one of the Apple IDs in our household has iTunes Match subscription - we share a 180G music library that is on our home network drive - and we want both voices to be able to control the same music library. It was working until a couple of days ago.

That said, if having voice recognition feature on is the only way to solve this problem, then we will probably add another iTunes Match subscription, since it is still much more affordable than Apple Music, especially when we only want to listen to our own music.

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Answer 3

turingtest2

Level 10

277,723 points

Apr 7, 2025 03:25 AM in response to agchan

Perhaps I wasn't clear. Turning voice recognition on has been known to break the ability of HomePod to play from an iTunes Match library. I was recommending turning it off if you had turned it on. You might check anyway in case a HomePod update has enabled it in error.

tt2

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Answer 4

agchan Author

Level 1

8 points

Apr 7, 2025 07:18 AM in response to turingtest2

Ah! I got it. I was very deliberate about not turning the voice recognition on when I was going through the troubleshooting steps because I wanted to be sure both of us could access the same music library with voice commands. But good to know that the turning that feature on could potentially cause the problem. Thx.

And it automagically worked again yesterday without me doing anything else.

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Answer 5

turingtest2

Level 10

277,723 points

Apr 7, 2025 10:49 AM in response to agchan

agchan wrote:

...

And it automagically worked again yesterday without me doing anything else.

👍

tt2

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HomePod can play all music but does not recognize Playlists, Artist, etc.

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