How to Make an Apple HomePod Almost As Useful As an Echo
The HomePod (and its smaller brother, the HomePod mini) are nowhere near as ubiquitous and useful out of the box as the Amazon Echos, but they are great smart speakers for those in the Apple ecosystem. You don’t have to use Alexa FOMO all the time, though – with a few defaults of your HomePod or HomePod mini (and some creative thinking), you can turn it into a more useful and enjoyable device.
Reduce heavy bass levels by default
Even if you are a passionate bass player, chances are good that you are not a fan of the excessive bass effect on the HomePod mini. The tiny speaker on the mini isn’t capable of producing the same satisfying bass as the larger HomePod, but the default output is the same, which means that sound quality can be better if you reduce the HomePod mini’s bass output. After updating your HomePod software to version 15.0, you will see an easy way to reduce the bass using the Home app.
To reduce the bass on your HomePod or HomePod mini, open the Home app on your iPhone, press and hold the HomePod icon. This will open the playback controls. Scroll down; the sound settings are located under the Timers section. Turn on the Reduce Bass setting under Music & Podcasts.
Normalize volume for all songs
Since audio mastering styles vary widely in the music industry, there is a high chance that some songs in your playlists sound and others sound too quiet. Luckily, your HomePod has the ability to normalize the volume levels of all of these songs to baseline. This option is called Sound Check and you can enable it through the Home app.
Open the Home app, hold the HomePod icon and scroll down. In the Music & Podcasts section, turn on sound testing .
Adjust the sound quality to your liking
While HomePod doesn’t have its own equalizer, you can adjust the equalizer settings in the Music app on your iPhone and then use AirPlay to play that sound through the HomePod. To do this, you can unlock your iPhone, go to Settings> Music> Equalizer and choose your favorite equalizer preset. Start playing a song in the Music app, tap the player to enlarge it, and tap the AirPlay icon. Select HomePod to send audio to speaker. (If you’re not using Apple Music, most streaming apps, including Spotify, have their own equalizers that you can use to your advantage.)
Accurate volume change
There are some things your HomePod can’t do without using Siri voice commands, including granular volume controls . If you want to set your HomePod to 62 percent volume, using Siri is the only way to do it reliably, as neither the volume slider on your iPhone nor the volume buttons on the top of the HomePod are as precise. Try saying “Hey Siri, volume 62 percent” or something similar to get the desired result.
Disable Siri (if you’re not using it)
Speaking of Siri, not everyone is comfortable with an always-on recording device in their home. HomePod is designed for use with Apple’s Siri voice assistant, but if you don’t want it to listen to you, you can turn it off.
Go to HomePod settings in the Home app. In the Siri section, turn off the following options:
- Listen to “Hey Siri”
- Press and hold for Siri
You can also tap Siri History and select Delete Siri History to delete all your Siri activities from Apple’s servers. (While you are doing this, you can also turn off personal requests .)
Set up useful automation on your HomePod
Setting your HomePod to play songs automatically or always tell you when your spouse gets home from work is a lot cooler than asking him to do it every time. You can set up this and other automation in the HomePod settings in the Home app.
Go to HomePod Settings> Automation and click on Add Automation . There are a few basic triggers you can experiment with: People come, People leave, and Time of day. The easiest to set up is “Time of Day”, which allows you to play specific songs or playlists at any time you choose. (I’ve set up an automation that plays classical music for an hour at sunset every weekday.) You can set up as many automations as you like.
More interesting automation is location-based: You can use the People Arrive trigger to have the HomePod automatically play music when you or your family arrive home. This requires location services to be enabled on both the HomePod and your linked Apple devices, because this is how the HomePod determines that the person in question has arrived home.
Similarly, you can use the People Leave trigger to ask the HomePod to stop playing music when you leave the house. If you’re trying to scare someone , you can even set your HomePod to play loud music the moment you leave.
Buy a second HomePod for easy home theater setup
You really won’t be able to unleash the true magic of the HomePod audio capabilities until you pair the two in stereo – and that setup is even better when you add an Apple TV 4K. The two HomePods don’t quite provide full surround sound, but they are much easier to set up than a bundle of wired speakers throughout the room.