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Google Speaker Groups not working

MsLevis
Community Member

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!!!  

607 REPLIES 607

blrhead
Community Member

Has anyone had any success with this? I have a home hub, mini, and nest audio which were all working fine as a group and now they don't. Only one speaker will play audio 

JonasDK
Community Member

Just a thought, but read that Sonos has a lawsuit on google. 5 different patents. Wifi connectivity and "volume adjustment" and groups is 3 of them what I can read on the internet. Sonos claim that google has "stolen" different patents from them. And that's obviously 3 of the main problems in this forum right now in december 2021.

So Google: when do we get our units back up working again? Before Christmas?

 

https://www.reddit.com/r/googlehome/comments/rjbpde/did_google_just_disable_stereo_pair_volume/ 

 

holographic
Community Member

Hey there, I've been reading this threads but still I haven't found a solution.

My speakers group don't work together. I have a Google nest mini with 2 Urbanears speakers. I have always been able to use them all together and my problem just started 1 month ago. Everything is up to date, I even try rebooting all the devices and connecting them to the wifi one more time but the problem remains. If I play them in a group one of them will start playing for like 5 seconds and move to the next device and so on.

 

This is so frustrating.

Has anyone found a solution?

Moozicmon
Community Member

It's great to see Google taking this issue seriously and responding to the nonstop activity in this thread highlighting the fact a fundamental feature is broken. 

You're right. metabrewing in a Reddit forum talking about the same issue told: "Now, it seems they have a known bug that's getting worse and they are not publicly acknowledging it. Until I pressed him, the customer service representative acted like this was some one off issue. He finally fessed up it was a known bug after I pointed out that people have been complaining about this for a long time."

phidel
Community Member

I assume this is sarcasm...

 

sland2000
Community Member

So pleased I found this thread, the issue is driving me mad. Again the speaker group was working. I bought a new Home Max. I can get individual speakers to work but not with the Max. It worked when I bought it but not now. 

Someone suggested deleting the default music provider and hey presto it worked, all speakers were playing together. Then a week later its stopped again. 

 

Iggies
Community Member

I am having similar problems with the groups. reading this thread trying to find the solution...is there one?

MarceloL
Community Member

Sadly no solution yet 😕

blrhead
Community Member

This issue appeared about a month ago. I thought it was because I switched out my Google Home for a Nest Audio, but sadly that was not the case. I've pretty much given up and will wait for a software update since all the troubleshooting steps that I have taken have not resolved the issue. 

FrankNL
Community Member

Ah... I thought so. Forget my other question. No need to reset the entire network. It simply won't help.

blrhead
Community Member

So I finally got it to work. I think it has to do with my router and how the devices connect to it. 
I recently replaced my Google Nest Router with one supplied by T-Mobile Home Internet (which by the way is amazing!), however, I was having issues ever since I restarted the network (I haven't done a full reset) and from then on all my Google Home/Nest devices were not working properly when grouping and/or setting up stereo with two nest audios. 
So today I had some time and was a bit bored and brought out my Google Nest Router and decided to create a new network and factory reset all my Google Home/Nest audio devices and once I set everything back, all my audio devices connected as a group and was able to pair my nest audios. 
I guess it was an issue with my T-mobile Router so I can try factory resetting it and see if that helps, but yeah it is a pain that I have to set up my network and all my devices again.. 

BurntOC
Community Member

I wish you the very best, but I am going to bet the devices and groups start to have issues again within several weeks, if not sooner.  If anythings changes whatsoever - it usually puts us back at square one.  

FrankNL
Community Member

Well, keep us posted! I am very curious about what is to come of this. It would be crazy if only Google Routers could do the job, don't you think so?

blrhead
Community Member

So far no issues. I did have an issue earlier today casting to a group, but restarted my phone and that resolved it. I have a feeling it is isolated to the router and how the devices were connecting to the network. For now I’ll use my google nest router since it works very well overall and I do like using it. 
I hope everyone else is able to find a solution for this. 

FrankNL
Community Member

Hi blrhead, how are you doing now with the speaker groups? Did it really help? Or did the problem came back? At my side the problem remains...

blrhead
Community Member

Hi there.. So I decided to minimize the amount of technology I have here at home so I removed the Nest Wifi and I did a factory reset on my T-Mobile Home Internet router, kept the same SSID and all my speakers are still working as a group. Not sure why it works, but I feel the factory reset on the router helped. 

phidel
Community Member

That's a preposterously huge amount of work. Google clearly is clueless about this and not making any effort to fix their broken system.

bachesta
Community Member

I also had reliability issues with my speaker group. Audio devices would appear to randomly come in and out of a 9 device speaker group. It was very frustrating.  In my setup I had a google mesh with 3 access points connected to an xfinity cable modem/gateway. I found that my problem was due to having two wifi access points running with the same web name and password. The clue that I had was that I noticed that on one side of the house my google speaker group would only have 2 of 9 devices. The other side of the house would see 6 or 7 of the 9 audio devices. All of my devices were google access points, mini's and chromecast and nest Hub devices.

My solution was to rename the xfinity wifi to a different WEP name so that it didn't conflict with the audio device Wifi connection. Once all of my audio devices were connected to the google mesh, the speaker group started working as expected. 

I still have occasional issues where the streaming music will have intermittent gaps, but I think that's a different issue from the variable speaker group device issue.

AB23
Community Member

Yes - finally found out what was wrong:

seems like it is the router that is causing the problem. Go to the router settings -> wifi -> bandwidth. Here the bandwidth on my router was set for 20/40Mhz (2.4Ghz). I forced it to be 40Mhz. After that, everything works. Even the ~20 speaker groups I previously unsuccesfully created, appeared in google home app. Now music is playing simultaniously on all my HK citation units. 

Hope it works for you guys too!

Jdurand
Community Member

Tried it, no change: my JBL, Lenovo, Visio and Insignia devices still do not play the music via speaker groups.  Only Google manufactured devices work in groups.  I too have an Orbi RBR850 router and 2 RBS850 satellites in a mesh network.  Speaker groups have had all kinds of problems this year but currently the issue is speaker groups do not cast music to devices not made by Google.  My guess would be that Google recently did a change to the casting firmware version and they changed the casting web services to work specifically with that new version on their devices but have not made the new casting firmware available to 3rd parties who build google "ready" devices.  Shame on Google!  If that is the case 3rd party manufacturers will be less and less tempted to build Google home devices and if that happens Google Home/Nest will be history...  Welcome Alexa.  Google are definitely not very smart about this situation.  They will be kicking themselves to the curb... 

AB23
Community Member

I dont believe it is a general problem - otherwise, google engineers would have been all over the issue to fix it. I think it is a specific problem in your (our in this thread) general setup. First place for me to search was the router as it seemed like the connection to the devices in google home was unstable. Have you tried to look at other issues that might be specific to your system? 

Orbi RBR850 also seems to have stability issues. Look here:

https://windsorwebdeveloper.com/making-netgear-orbi-great-again/

and here

https://community.netgear.com/t5/Orbi-WiFi-6-AX-and-WiFi-6E-AXE/Orbi-RBR850-and-RBS850-Frequently-Di...

Hope you are successfull! 🙂

AsteroidS
Community Member

sadly did not work for me

AB23
Community Member

Damned - I hoped it would work for you guys.

The lead for me was that the connection to the devices seemed unstable and I looked into what could cause unstable connections on the router. In the router help documents, there was a troubleshooting guide for increased stability and here I found the 20/40Mhz solution. I have a Asus router, maybe you have another brand with other stability issues? 

FrankNL
Community Member

Same for me... instable group problem remains. I really do not have any network problems (Deco X60 Mesh router) and I disabled the roaming function for the Nest Audio devices.  Still looking for clues...

ARK
Community Member

Also have a DecoX60 mesh. Having the same issue. This wasn’t a problem when I had the google wifi mesh network. Once I switched to the deco mesh, it worked for a few weeks, but after that same issue. All of my speaker devices are google (homes and minis). Super frustrating. 
did you ever find a solution? 

BKK
Community Member

I have Google mesh wifi and have the same problem with my Google nest speakers, so don't think it's the mesh network, it's the speakers. 

serum
Community Member

It's still a mess here (netherlands too) Did you ever found a solution Frank?

phidel
Community Member

How do I get to my router settings?

 

Mookie
Community Member

I doubt that router / multicast topics are the root cause of all, since casting to the group always works (at least in my case) when doing it via an app - so obviously the devices have a stable connection - but giving a VOICE command does not work (to be correct: only works sometimes)

DLB
Community Member

So weird, same issue.

Did a factory reset, deleted Google Home App,  created 2 separate groupings, google acknowledges both groupings and will say "alright, playing music from Spotify  on both" but only works on one device. Home or mini.

 

serum
Community Member

Same here.. It's horrible. You ever found a fix?

phidel
Community Member

There's 4 hours of your life you'll never get back....

obsoletemachine
Community Member

Same issue as everyone. 

 

Some of the speakers, and there's a mixture of Google home minis, Google home audios, and Google hub Max,  throughout the house. And they're all in different groups based on if they're in a specific room or a different level in the house, etc. When I try to play the group that is considered the upstairs, it will start on all of the devices, and at some point the one that I have in the dining room, which are two Google home minis, will suddenly just start skipping and start to fade out and almost sound like they're underwater. And then once they go out, then the whole upstairs goes down. If I trouble and back to the YouTube Music app which is my default app player, it has already restarted itself. So I don't know what's going on, it seems like whenever the speaker's mess up it's restarting the YouTube music app as well. Or maybe you have too many windows open. Even if I only have the Google home app and the YouTube Music app open. I guess that's considered too many windows open? Everything is running on the latest firmware and software, my YouTube music app is up to date, and this is all running on a Pixel 6 Pro.  I have restarted all of the devices, I have restarted the Wi-Fi, and it's still messing up.

Feedback
Community Member

I've had this problem for a few months.  I posted this and the support team immediately closed it saying they'll take it offline.  Then I got a mail saying "thanks for reporting your issue.  we are closing it now that it's resolved."  Thanks Google.

In any event, I'm still having this problem.  It says it tries to play it on the speaker group then says something went wrong.  I have a Nest Hub 1st Gen and Google Mini.  It all worked fine before.  It started to break around the time the Fuchia update came out so I'm inclined to think that broke it.  Alongside this problem, the device itself is very unstable.  It often will try to play music (Pandora) and then just crash the device completely.  Or it will say "playing music" and then just hang forever and then dump back to the home screen.  I've factory reset it multiple times without any luck.

Zeane
Community Member

Exactly the same problem. Speaker Groups are not showing up on Google Hone App! 

 

Extremely frustrating, as there is no info published by Google. Just when you're at the tine of the year when thus facility would be most useful. 

 

😷😭

BurntOC
Community Member

Yup, but again, Google will ALWAYS half a** everything that isn't immeditately generating $$$ to their search empire.  I'm all Android and Google, but this I know, and Apple gets more appealing every day - even with their own issues.

FrankNL
Community Member

For me too. (Using Google/Nest Audio stuff only). My conclusion is that we are dealing with clumsy intermittent erroneous software services between the Google servers and the Google home devices as any other thing I (and so many others) have tried didn't work out sustainably. I have had it to be honest.

PaulMDavis
Community Member

Hi. I'm having the same issue. I only have Google speakers. 2 x's Nest Mini, 1x's Nest Audio, 1x's Google home hub, and 1x's Google Mini. I can cast to each individually and play on each individually, but CANNOT play on the speaker group. When I do it will play to only some, but not all the speakers. Any help here would be appreciated!

Jdurand
Community Member

Found the problem with Orbi and casting to speaker groups!!!!  I was going over all the settings that could affect the casting function and had a stupid idea: what if the router ERRONEOUSLY thinks the casting to a group is a Denial of Service Attack?  So I disabled port scan and DoS Protection and BLAM all of my speakers work within a group.  Now I have to get the Netgear folks to tone down their DoS protection because you do want to use DoS protection.