Google Speaker Groups not working

[MsLevis]

I'm also having similar problems-  Have mix of Google audio cast and google enabled speakers across the house- most of the time casting doesn't work - If I go into the home app the groups are disappearing and re-appearing alot- I'll select a group that worked the day before and only one speaker plays - it still shows all devices playing-  I can try it a few times- go in and out of the google home app and try to force it that way- sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn't - all the firmware is up to date and it's just SOOOOO frustrating -  I even went and got a new google home speaker thinking maybe gen1 was causing an issue- nope still same problem-  COME ON GOOGLE!!!  

[ClausBP]

Hi Muddy!

Please see my latest post.

For some reason I have not had any issues for a long time now 🙂

Best regards

Claus

[Muddi]

Hey ClausBP,

My apologies. My last post should address all other users on this thread. Moving forward, I'm glad that your speaker group is working - thanks for sharing it! 

Cheers,

Muddi

[NikolaiM]

Most of us have tried this, many times. I moved a couple months ago and set up a brand new router and added 5 Google speakers after resetting and updating all of them. Same issues as before, some speakers not playing in the group. All speakers are close to the router. 

[ClausBP]

No problem, Muddi.

I may use your expertise at a later point 🙂

Best regards
Claus

[Muddi]

Hi NikolaiM,

Thanks for the information. Could you try setting up 2 of your devices on a mobile hotspot to check if you will have the same issue when playing on speaker group. This is for us to further isolate network issues. 

Cheers,

Muddi

[NikolaiM]

I can create groups of 2 speakers without any issues. Problems start with groups of 3 or more. 

[Yirmoma]

What a joke I create a new speaker group every week when they break and stop working. I love how you stole Sonos as technology so that as your own and now you can't use it so you have a piece of **bleep** paperweight "Assistant" which mainly argues with me and tells me how freaking smart it is I'm glad you guys spend a lot of time making sure it knows how smart it is even though it can't turn the volume up and down or figure out how to make speakers work together, what a joke.

[Rotorguy3]

No thanks.  I have a way that it works for me. Not like it's supposed to, but nevertheless it works

[saschko]

Hy Muddi,

you asked to list down all the speakers included in the group. I did that several times before. But here again: 
- one JBL Playlist (lets call it JBL A)

- another JBL Playlist (lets call it B)

- two google nest speakers (C and D)

- a google mini (E)

- a google chromecast audio (F), connected to my av receiver

A group of A & B works.

A group of C, D, E and F (or any combination of them) works as well.

A group of A, B and (any of C, D or E): only one speaker of (A or B) plays music, but not both speakers simultaneously. They play music alternately in a irregular pattern. Sounds very horrible.

My main scenario (all speakers) does not work at all.

And the most annoying thin is: it worked for several years as advertised (mutliroom audio). But almost 2 years ago it stopped working.

[BurntOC]

Great info. I'll bet with some coordination, a motivated law firm could tie the firmware pushes and dates used to begin defeaturing this capability.

[DeeSaR]

One thing I observed is regarding the wifi router. My roter has an option, to detect congested wifi channels and offers a function called "Automatic Channel Selection", to switch to a less congested channel automatically. 

DO NOT USE THIS! as the Google cast crap can not handle this. Select an fixed channel. The problems are not gone completely, but the connection lasts much longer (one to two weeks, compared with one to three days when the option is activated.) 

[Muddi]

Hey saschko,

I understand what you feel. It's the speaker's manufacturer who can decide whether they will release an update on their devices or not. Also, they need to consider the capacity of the device to get a firmware update. Meanwhile, you can still play music on speaker speaker group with your Chromecast devices and a Google Home/Nest devices.

@DeeSaR: Thanks for sharing those information.

Cheers,

Muddi

[ClausBP]

Hi!
All my devices:
Google Nest's
Google Nest Hubs,
JBL Link
JBL Soundbar Mulitibeam 5.0
B&O Beoplay M3
Chromecast Audio
Philips Hue lamps and contacts

has been working in both my 2 homes completely without issues with groups and spoken Google commands for several months!!!!! Not one single issue!!!!

I wonder what is wrong???

Best regards

Claus

[Rotorguy3]

...and then one day they won't 

[Gijs]

Don't know if this helps, but I wanted to make a stereo pair, and this is done differently but works nice:

https://support.google.com/googlenest/answer/7559493#zippy=%2Cgoogle-nest-audio

[Muddi]

Hi NikolaiM,

Thanks for trying. Looks like the issue is related to network congestion since grouping fewer speakers works fine on your network. You can try adjusting the channel settings on your router to improve the signal or move your devices within 15-20 ft. away from your router.

@Gijs: Thanks for sharing the link.

Cheers,

Muddi

[StevieStevie]

I’ve tried as few as two speakers in a group and that doesn’t work either. I don’t have network congestion there’s nothing else running except for Google Home Pandora and then attempt to run these speakers together in a group. What happened to it it looks different and it doesn’t work what are we supposed to do how do we fix this mess??? everybody seems to have the same problem for different reasons I’ve tried everything I can think of everything I’ve read and so far nothing has worked. 

[BKK]

Personally I've given up on Google fixing this mess and have been slowly transitioning over to Sonos.  In general I've been a big Google fan: Pixel6 Pro, Google mesh wifi, Chromebook, Samsung tablet, Nest speakers, Nest hub.  But I've been pretty disappointed over the last year. Replaced mesh wifi with Eero 6+ mesh which significantly outperforms Google mesh and replacing Google speakers with Sonos speakers. It's a shame that they don't seem to care about their hardware customers much these days. 

[StevieStevie]

Ok, others of us have this same problem. I for one have a network with gig speed and I'm the only one using it. 1 person with a gig should not be causing this google BS.  I never had any problems with google speaker groups until recently, which leads me to believe that Google has done something that they have as of yet not disclosed to us here.  They better do something soon or they're definitely going to be losing customers. There are other options out there so get it together Google!!

[Chadbendel]

I'm at a loss. I went through and restarted each one of the speakers. Now more are showing than before but still not showing two. 

[Chadbendel]

It's also very weird because now the speaker groups that we're showing before and then disappeared, our back again. Even though there are three speakers as part of the group, music only casts to one of them. All of the speakers are listed on the homepage of the Google home app, but when I try to cast, like from my phone for example, they don't even show up.

[AsteroidS]

mine was miraculously fixed one day

[SusieQt]

Having previously reported problems I deleted all speaker groups and used the touch screen on my Nest Max to play the radio and Spotify on more than one speaker. This worked most times for a while; I had to occasionally turn the speakers off and on again. Then I noticed that this manual selection of speakers was working every time so I’ve recreated my groups and so far (day 2) they are working either from an instruction in a routine and when I ask Google to play over a speaker group. All my speakers are Google products - a Nest Max, a Nest Mini, a Google Speaker and 2x Google Homes (I only tend to have 2 or 3 working in a group at any one time. 

[StevieStevie]

I have the same problem but now I can’t get anything to play in a speaker group I can get one speaker at a time to play and that is it so what am I supposed to do with eight speakers that I can’t put in a group?? I want to know what happened to it because it used to work perfectly I’ve had up to five speakers in a group without any issues at all it’s just a big fat mess now!!!!

[Chadbendel]

Same issue here. Completely random. Today none of my downstairs speakers are available in cast... They're all connected to the internet and can play independently, but the only speakers showing in cast on my android through YouTube music are upstairs. All connected to the same wifi too. 

[sdoyle98]

I just restarted my mesh router and my groups work fine.  Every now and then I will have an issue but restarting the router works.   I have a mix of the minis, google home and nest audios along with one 3rd party soundbar and have two groups, one with two nest audios and a soundbar and one with two minis.  

[ClausBP]

JBL Bar 5.0 - Problem connecting to the Cloud

Hi - I try to add a JBL Bar 5.0 soundbar to Google Home

I manage to add it and it is working fine when I cast to it.

But when I try to go to settings (the cogwheel) for the device - I get this message:
"Problem connecting to the Cloud"

This works fine with all my other devices - Nests, Chromecast audio, JBL speaker...

Do you have any suggestions?

[ClausBP]

Solved!!!

I tried to assign a static new IP address to the Soundbar on my Router.

And that resolved the issue 😊

Best regards

Claus

[Quantumy]

Google frustrates me more every day. By getting more google devices thinking that my life will get easier by having a nice eco system I get the opposite result. I am constantly debugging issues after issues. After countless hours to set up my Best minis, I spent more hours grouping my nest minis with another nest speaker, it all worked last night. Then this morning when I tried to listen to music, I no longer see the grouped speakers I created last night. When I try to cast a new group I keep getting this message: there are no devices connected to this network". This f$&#@ng frustrating. Is this is supposed to be the company that employs the highly paid top software engineers?

Frankly this is tiring and getting hold of live google support is a nightmare, mission impossible. How is this possible?

[Chadbendel]

Yeah I'm experiencing the same issues. Was part of the Home beta test so figured I'd have some issues but it's out of beta and still the same thing. Add my pixel buds to the mix and it's a comedy of errors that is so frustrating it's almost funny.

[DeeSaR]

The only top developers at Google are working on the "placing ads algorithms. The team responsible for chromecast / nest are definitely incompetent.

[StevieStevie]

Or non-existent!!

[jonathan1980]

I had the same problem - 3 Google speakers and one Google enabled soundbar. Could get the 3 Google speakers to play together and the soundbar to play by itself but not all together.

I tried all the usual stuff but in the end this worked:

Find out the IP address of the 3rd party speaker and go into your router settings to find this device. Then select "reserve IP address" - I think the wording may be different depending on what router you have but if you see anything about fixing or removing dynamic IP address select this.

This worked for me, hopefully will work for you too.

[OmaCoder]

Case opened March 2022:

3-3216000031841

"Sun, Mar 27, 2022 at 4:18 PM <#> wrote:

Hello Brian,
We are aware of this issue and our team is still working on it."

Me, a month later:

asking for a status: no response.

Me, a few months later:

asking for a status: no response.

Community specialist in Sept 2022:

"Upon further checking, our team is still looking into the issue about the speaker group. I'll check with the team again and update you via email."

Me, Dec 2022:

Still no update received from community specialist.

This blows my mind.

[ClausBP]

This lack of support is really annoying and very embarrassing for Google.

[StevieStevie]

I’ve given up, expecting or trying to get any kind of support from Google regarding this if they can’t do some thing about it within a year then there’s something seriously wrong at google! 

[OmaCoder]

Yeah I've given up too but it still surprises me. How come there isn't a class action lawsuit yet

[StevieStevie]

Well, I’m willing and ready! The only reason I even like got involved with Google was because I have an android phone and I like being able to set things up the way that I prefer. I do not like the way that Apple makes us follow these ridiculous “stupid people”rules that they for some reason think is what we all want. There are a lot of things I can’t do with this iPhone that I was able to do with my android and it’s very annoying.!  But if Google continues to not provide support for their products well I guess we’re gonna be stuck with Apple!

[OmaCoder]

Yes it's nice to have all hardware from the same manufacturer in hopes that it plays nicely together. Maybe instead of moving to apple, it's worth switching over everything to Sonos first? 

[Quantumy]

The issue got resolved by itself without doing anything.  That is the real issue when getting into problems there is no google store, or chat line to help you right away.  That is the reason lots of people prefer Apple because the customer experience is better.