How to play media to both Sonos AND HomePod speakers

Configuration Frontend
1

I think I posed this question originally to the wrong place, so I’ll try again.

I have a combination of Sonos and Apple Homepod Minis around the house. The Mini-player works great with all the Sonos speakers. Basically, I have Sonos in most rooms and pretty much use the grouping to play music and alert messages to the whole house. However, some rooms, like the garages and bathrooms, only have (cheaper) HomePod Minis, and I’d like to be able to send the music and alerts to those as well. However, if I add in a Homepod to my Mini-Player configuration file, it doesn’t seem to recognize it - or at least nothing comes out of the device. Perhaps I’m doing something really silly.

The YAML configuration code snippet below shows an example of how one of the the Sonos is configured, which works great; the second bit shows how the HomePod is configured, which does not work at all. Both entities show up as media players, so I’m at odds to understand why the HomePods are silent.

#Sonos speaker configuration, which works great
 - type: custom:mini-media-player
    entity: media_player.darrells_office_sonos
    name: Darrell's Office SONOS
    icon: phu:sonos-one
    artwork: none
    hide:
      power: true
      progress: true
      controls: true
    speaker_group:
      show_group_count: false
    group: false
#HomePod configuration which doesn't work at all
  - type: custom:mini-media-player
    entity: media_player.darrells_homepod
    name: Darrell's Office HomePod
    artwork: none
    hide:
      power: true
      progress: true
      controls: true
    speaker_group:
      show_group_count: false
    group: false

Later in the configuration file, where the entities are ‘grouped’, I have:

speaker_group:
  platform: SONOS
  show_group_count: false
  supports_master: false
  entities:
    - entity_id: media_player.darrells_office_sonos
    - entity_id: media_player.darrells_homepod

Any thoughts?

2

Darrell,
I haven’t tried this myself, but is it possible that you could use the AirPlay multiple speaker feature with both the HomePods and the Sonos?
-David

3

Hi David.

I wasn’t aware of a specific AirPlay integration in HA - I need to do some investigating. (Full discolsure, I’m not a fan of Sonos over AirPlay, as I’ve had bad experiences with reliability when running them directly from my iPad using iTunes.)

As I said, my Sonos set up works just great on its own. Maybe I’ll just have to bite the bullet and get speakers for the other rooms…although I still need to deploy HomePods as well, because Siri is my voice assistant of choice throughout the house (less verbal diarrhea than Alexa!)

Cheers, Darrell

4

Darrell, I haven’t done any audio integration in HA so I don’t know what the state of that is. We control all my Sonos/other devices from our phones via AirPlay and it works great for audio in multiple rooms at the same time. It may be that you can use that feature from HA, but I’m really not sure.
-David

5

considering my setup (lots of different speakers/needs like room adjustments etc.) I went with Owntone and it’s integration in HA. The integration itself is not great, but it allows me to do multiroom without too much hassle.

6