And by sometimes, I mean practically always. For a while now at my store I’ve been experiencing an odd issue, where the two OG HomePods I have for music in the retail area will randomly become unreachable from the front desk iMac.

Most mornings, we will hit play in the Music app and the wee AirPlay icon in the top right will become badged with an exclamation mark. We have to restart the iMac for that to work again, simply quitting and reopening Music for some reason is insufficient. We run UniFi equipment for our networking infrastructure, and I have tried altering a number of network settings thinking they might be relevant, but to no avail. The problem occurs whether the iMac is using WiFi or ethernet, both of which have a static IP (as do the HomePods), and recently I decided I wanted to try again to resolve this issue. What is odd is that, if you close the Music app in the evening, and open it the following morning, it works fine…

One solution I then considered was creating an AppleScript to automatically close Music in the evening. What I ended up doing was simply setting Energy Saver for the iMac to shut down automatically in the evening, and then start up in the morning. I think overall that is the simplest solution, but I would still love to work out exactly why the problem occurs!

Currently listening: DJ BORING - “Winona”