For months I've struggled to develop morning wakeup routines to play my music playlists (classical music). Nothing worked. Nobody at the Google help desk had any answers of even a setup similar to mine to try a test themselves. None had ever thought to do this themselves. Their answer was to delete all routines, uninstall and reinstall and start over.
But using my decades of software developing and testing experience, I finally found an ugly workaround that works.
First my setup: Google nest router with 2 wifi points. 9 nest speakers including the 2 wifi points arranged in 4 overlapping groups. Home app running on android phone and android tablet. All the latest versions. YouTube Premium plus Youtube music subscription. There may be other features or settings that makes my different than other users but I can't imagine what they would be.
I created 7 large playlists on YouTube music, one for each morning of the week to be played in shuffle mode.
My Findings:
1. All of what I wanted to do playing playlists to groups of speakers is easily done by voice control. Routines are far more buggy and limited.
2. Never use the "play and control media" action to play music because you are limited to a single speaker. (Google could fix this by adding a speaker group choice and volume setting.)
3. Never use a Household routine to play your playlists. Some random public playlist will be substituted OR nothing will happen and you will get no feedback.
4. Use only a Personal routine with the following features:
- A start time and day(s) of the week. Only routines with a start time allow you to specify a "device for audio" (but not a speaker group!?). All routines without start times are assumed to be triggered by voice command and default to play on the speaker that heard to command. You must pick a speaker that is NOT in the group you actually want to use.
- A "try adding your own" custom action of the form: Play <playlistname> playlist
- or: Shuffle <playlist> playlist
- DO NOT add the usual phrase "on <groupname>" at the end of your action. This will confuse your assistant and you will get the wrong playlist or nothing.
- A pause of 10 seconds (or the next action won't work).
- A custom action of the form: Move music to <groupname>. The "device for audio" defined above cannot be part of the group you want for this to work. This "move" action will (stupidly) cause the assistant voice to ask to verify the move (as if you were using voice command). Just ignore this and the move will work. To suppress the assistant voice you could precede the pause with a "adjust home devices" to lower the volume on the original "device for audio". (I separately have a 2AM daily routine that readjusts volume on all speakers one at a time to my preferred defaults).
BTW. The Youtube music "shuffle" process is broken. Many songs in a playlist are never played. Also, no one can tell me how shuffle is supposed to work. It's not just a matter of playing songs randomly. A good shuffle routine IMO has 2 features
- It starts with a random song (NOT always the first song).
- It's never repeats any song until all have been played once. Then no repeats until all have been played twice, etc.
