HomePod mini streams randomly stopping

Interesting, as is it is my opinion that the music skipping, pausing, etc. issues are essentially an issue with Apple Music streaming and not the Homepods themselves.

We have a Homepod 2, 2 Mini stereo pairs and 2 Mini singles in our home. All are currently v18.4.1 . We use Apple Music for streaming music. I have reported music stops and music synchronization issues to Apple starting with v17.x . I was contacted by Apple support and numerous support calls and diagnostic data capture steps were completed. As of v18.4.1, the synchronization issues are still not resolved, I think they have lessened some but the issues still occur on a daily basis, usually within 1-2 hours. The music stops have also lessened and may occur once a day. I can only hope that eventually these are resolved. Sorry but your situation seems much more extreme then mine. I wish I had a suggestion.

I have something that may be a fix for you. For some time I’ve had Apple Music stopping or starting new streams I didn’t ask for. I have three HomePods and a HomePod original on a Linksys mesh network. I tried rebooting, resetting, fiddling with settings on the Linksys router (such as client steering, etc.), etc. Nothing worked. I finally traced it to the HomePod and Minis being set to listen for either “Hey Siri” or “Siri”. When I changed this to using only “Hey Siri”, the problems went away. I can only guess that the HomePods were listening to each other, or perhaps to a person speaking in one of the rooms in which they reside, getting triggered to listen for instructions by something that sounded a little like “Siri”, and then trying to do something with what it heard. There may be other causes of random behavior of Apple Music and other kinds of fixes, but this simple change fixed everything for me. I hope this helps.

I have something that may be a fix for you. For some time I’ve had Apple Music stopping or starting new streams I didn’t ask for. I have three HomePods and a HomePod original on a Linksys mesh network. I tried rebooting, resetting, fiddling with settings on the Linksys router (such as client steering, etc.), etc. Nothing worked. I finally traced it to the HomePod and Minis being set to listen for either “Hey Siri” or “Siri”. When I changed this to using only “Hey Siri”, the problems went away. I can only guess that the HomePods were listening to each other, or perhaps to a person speaking in one of the rooms in which they reside, getting triggered to listen for instructions by something that sounded a little like “Siri”, and then trying to do something with what it heard. There may be other causes of random behavior of Apple Music and other kinds of fixes, but this simple change fixed everything for me. I hope this helps.

We have also experienced an issue when enabling the additional "Siri" option. We have found that some words starting with S can often trigger a response from Siri. Such as calling "Hey Sweetie" to my wife will trigger Siri. There are others I can't remember at the moment. While i prefer the ability to trigger Siri by just using "Siri", we experience too many false triggers and have gone back to using the "Hey Siri" only option. I can imagine other users who have enabled the "Siri" only option could experience unexpected actions because of the unintended triggering of Siri.