Speaker groups disapearing and not showing to cast to

[torntrousers]

I've 12 Google devices in my house I can cast to, all official Google devices - Home mini's , Chromecasts, Nest speakers and Nest displays, and I have accounts on Spotify, Apple music and Tidal, and I've set up several speaker groups in the Home app.  So I can say "Hey Google, play music on the downstairs group" or cast to speakers and groups from the cast icon in the Spotify, Apple music and Tidal apps.

When it works its great but the problem is it hardly ever works properly. In the list of castable devices in the Spotify, Apple music and Tidal apps the groups can hardly ever been seen and the speakers come and go from the list. So often I can't play music in the room I'm in becuase the speaker doesn't show and the groups are almost unusable becuase they so rarely show up.

There are a bunch of other reports similar to this on the Internet and I've tried the things suggested - clearing the Home app cache and storage, powering off/on my Wifi AP, etc, but none of that helps.

What can I do to get the speakers and especially groups being more reliable?

[GarrettDS]

Hey there,
Sorry for the late response, but I wanted to drop in here to help. 

I understand that these issues can be confusing but I definitely wanted to stop by and see how I could help. 

Just wanted to double check to see if you were still needing help on this? If so, what troubleshooting steps have you tried? 

I look forward to hearing from you.

Best regards, 
​​​​​​​Garrett DS
 

[torntrousers]

yes this is still a problem

[GarrettDS]

Hi there, 

Have you tried doing a factory reset on your speakers? Also have you tried deleting the current household and creating a new household for your speakers and creating a new speaker group?

I look forward to hearing from you. 

Best regards, 
Garrett DS

[torntrousers]

I have done a factory reset of one of the speakers recently for a fix for something else and it still has the same problem as the rest of them.

No I haven't tried deleting my household and recreating a new one. Would that help or are you just guessing at things for me to try?

[GarrettDS]

Hi there, 
It may help as it is one of the troubleshooting steps that we have users try to see if it helps. The issue could be a few different things, so we go through various steps to see what may work or help. 

Please let me know if that helps. 

Best regards, 
Garrett DS

[torntrousers]

Bit of a faff which is why I was nervous about trying it, but I have deleted the home, created a new one, created rooms, and added back all the devices.

Two of the old speaker groups magically appeared by themselves, and I tried creating another.

Now the newly created one isn't visible , and one of the old existing ones has disappeared. I think the only reason the one other was still visible is because I was playing music on it, so I stopped the music and now that group has dissapeared too.

So, not fixed. Any other suggestions?

[Tw3434]

Struggling with same issues!

[Princesss]

Hi torntrousers,

I appreciate all the details you've shared as well as the steps you tried. 

Since you've mentioned that you have 12 speakers in total, could you tell me the distance of each of the speakers from the router? Distance might also be one factor that's why speaker groups keeps on disappearing. However, if they do have a good distance from each other, there shouldn't be a problem.

Let's also try to reboot your network simply by unplugging the router from the power source for a few minutes to refresh your network settings and to avoid network congestion. Lastly, as soon as you have rebooted your router, let's try one by one to delete, reset and recreate the speaker groups making sure that they are in the same home structure. I know that these steps are quite lengthy, but let's give it a try so we can further check what's causing this to happen.

Keep us posted.

Best,

Princess

[Princesss]

Hi torntrousers,

Chiming in to check if you still need help with this? 

Let us know by responding to this thread, otherwise it will be locked.

Best,

Princess

[torntrousers]

Please don't close and lock this , it still does not work. Early closing is what has happened to the previous people I've found who have reported this problem - its not that they were fixed just not replying quickly enough.

The inital suggestion to blithely try just deleting my current home caused really anoying problems with all the customizations I'd done being lost which I still have not recovered from, for example, the Nest display in the kitchen to dispaly all my old photos instead of just the most recent 3 months, which took my some hunting around on the net to work out how to do, but now it just displays stock Google pictures and it was years ago I set it up so I can't find what i did to customise it.

I have started trying that last suggestions, they are not toally clear, but so far thats resulted in no improvement to music finding the speakers or groups but it has resulted in now if in the living room saying "hey google broadcast to the games room..." it says "sorry it looks like there isn't anything named games room in you account" ... but there is.

I'll spend some more time on this in the weekend and doing all the last suggestion but really i think just speaker groups don't work properly.

[torntrousers]

When you say "delete, reset and recreate the speaker groups" do you mean factory reset?

[Princesss]

Hi torntrousers,

Thanks for your detailed info. 15 meters is equivalent to 49 feet, considering there are many devices connected to the network, there might be congestions that's why some speakers doesn't appear on the app.

Yes, factory reset is basically going back from the start and restores its default settings. After resetting the speakers, device needs to be set up again. Let's try to perform a complete reset to 1-2 Google Home/Nest speakers preferably the ones that are closer to the router. I would also suggest that once you set it up, create a new home structure and set up the Google Home/Nest speakers there.

No worries, I'll keep this thread open so we can monitor its progress after you set it up. Keep me posted.

Best,

Princess

[torntrousers]

Thanks for your detailed info. 15 meters is equivalent to 49 feet, considering there are many devices connected to the network, there might be congestions that's why some speakers doesn't appear on the app.

That doesn't sound terribly beleivable to me, but I suppose the only way to deal with this now is to get a whole lot of power extenison connectors and move all the devices into the same room as the Wifi router and show that the speaker groups still don't work. Fine, I will do this in the weekend and report back.

[Princesss]

Hi torntrousers, 

Thanks for responding. 

We can do this on 1-2 or 3 devices as a comparison to the ones far from the router. I'll keep this thread open until next week so we can monitor if there are any progress on the troubleshooting steps that we will be trying.

Best,

Princess

[torntrousers]

I've been trying all this, nothing has helped yet.

Just to be clear, I didn't say the devices were 15 metres apart, i said they were at least less than that. None of them are very far from the Wifi AP, and now I've tried with just some and having those in the same room.

It really feels like there is some bug or flaw in the way groups and speakers are discovered. You can see it in the Google Home app just regularly refreshing the screen or restarting the app and seeing some devices and often the groups disapear.

And it doesn't seem to be just me, there is Tw3434 on this thread saying they have the same and if you search on the Internet others also reporting the same problem.

Isn't there some way to have this passed to developers support or something to get it looked at in more detail?

[Princesss]

Hi torntrousers,

Thanks for the update.  We'd be happy to take a look into this for you. Please fill up this form with all the needed information then let me know once done.

Best,

Princess

[torntrousers]

Thanks. I have filled in the form.

[Princesss]

Hi torntrousers,

Thanks for responding.

Could you please fill out the form again and make sure to include your username so I can easily locate it?

Thank you very much!

Best,

Princess

[torntrousers]

I have filled it in again

[Princesss]

Hi there,

Thanks for filling out the form. As a reference, here's your case ID: 6-8570000032700.

We'll contact you via email so we can continue this conversation via that channel. Let me know if I can assist you with anything else, otherwise I’ll be locking the thread. 

Best,

Princess

[torntrousers]

Could you leave this open for a little longer please so that I can update it with the solution?

Should only be a little bit longer now as the support has already contacted me with a potential fix.

[Princesss]

Hi torntrousers,

Thanks for sharing some details about your current network set up. I've also seen your conversation with one of my colleague regarding this. To further isolate the issue, we need to make sure to connect the devices in a network with no congestion. I know that you have a good network set up right now, however, we need to try connecting it to 5GHz frequency to further check if this bandwith is causing this to happen. 

I'll keep this thread open for the next few days until you've tried the suggested steps.

Best,

Princess

[Princesss]

Hi torntrousers,

Checking in to see if you have tried the suggested steps from the previous thread?

Feel free to update this post otherwise I’ll be locking the thread.

Best,

Princess

[Princesss]

Hi there,

I haven’t heard from you, so I’ll be locking the thread in 24 hours. Thanks for posting!

Best,

Princess

[torntrousers]

You ask:

Since you've mentioned that you have 12 speakers in total, could you tell me the distance of each of the speakers from the router? Distance might also be one factor that's why speaker groups keeps on disappearing. However, if they do have a good distance from each other, there shouldn't be a problem.

I would say all of them are less than 15 metres, probably a lot less. The Wifi access point is right in the middle of the house, so probably no more than 5 to 10 metres from the speakers.  Hard to see that this is relvent though, its not that they lose connection or are intermitent once playing. Its a high power access point, I think they all have a good signal.

[torntrousers]

Google support have suggested its to do with having devices on 2.4GHz and 5GHz Wifi. Some of the devices are Chromecast Audio's which only work on 2.4GHz. Disabling 5GHz on the Wifi Access Point did help with the groups being discovered more reliably, but then the audio often started stuttering and cutting out when playing on multiple spearkers. I've a BT Smarthub 2 and it turns out this is one of the few devices where its not possible to split the Wifi networks to have different SSID's so BT have sent me an older Smarthub 1 which I'm trying now with the 5GHz network split and having a different SSID and all the Chromcast devices just registered with the 2.4GHz network. It is a bit of a pain though if the phone or laptop not able to connect to the 5GHz network or the speaker groups don't show reliably again. Its odd that they do show sometimes though and that there was stuttering on the Smarthub 2 with only 2.4GHz. From Googling, the Chromecast discovery protocol uses mDNS which is an IP level protocol so people say it should work across both 2.4GHz and 5GHz networks but lots of reports of isses. Really feels like there is a bug somewhere but is it in Chromcasts, or the Tidal app, or the Wifi Access Point???

[torntrousers]

After a week - splitting the Wifi 2.4GHz and 5GHz into different SSIDs and having the Chromecast devices only use 2.4GHz does fix the problem with speakers and groups coming and going.

So i suppose its fine to close this.

Still not clear where the bug is though, and it must be a bug because it does work fine sometimes with both 2.4GHz and 5GHz.

[Princesss]

Hi torntrousers,

I appreciate you sharing the steps you did. It would be very helpful to other users who also experience the same thing. I would also recommend to keep your devices connected in the same frequency to avoid connectivity issues in the future.

Meanwhile, since this has been resolved, I'll consider this post complete and will lock the thread now. 

Cheers,

Princess