Using AirPlay. But as far as I understand from the media coverage, it does not support Home Sharing. So, you cannot say "Hey Siri, play me some King Gizzard and the Wizard Lizard" and expect it to be played from your computer.
Not having to go to your computer and enabling AirPlay and selecting an album is kind of the point of a home assistant ;).
You can stream music from any provider using your phone, but Apple mostly does not allow third party integration with Siri aside from a few preset commands that apps can register to implement. So using the Siri voice commands you can only control Apple Music, because that's all Apple chose to implement. I think they probably will add support for third party music players through Siri in the future, but Apple is probably not unhappy to give users another reason to choose Apple Music.
Presumably there would have to be some kind of Spotify "app" running on the HomePod, to access Spotify without a phone, but there is no SDK for that yet
It's amazing how so many people have been misled to believe that HomePod is limited to Apple Music, which is not true. I think it's both a failure on Apple's marketing part, and our own fears that Apple can deliberately lock us in to their ecosystem. Not entirely unbelievable unfortunately, but in case of HomePod it's just not true.
That it's not obvious. It's not a standard format and a lot of people will be slightly confused. It's understandable if you think about it but still not something everyone will get at first glance. Also the fact that it's localised to US only but both digits could be a day or a month will be even more confusing.
Just adding a .18 or even better making it 2.09.18 would have made things easier and I can't believe that it would have hurt the page design that hard.
”An Apple-designed A8 chip powers the most complex audio innovations in HomePod. Like real-time modeling of the woofer mechanics. Buffering that’s even faster than real time.”
But what does it have to do with the powerful cheap? Buffering is not very useful if it's slower than real time, and all that's needed for it is a connection and some memory.
"real-time modeling of the woofer mechanics" reminds me of those Philips Motional Feedback speakers [2] my parents bought in the late '70s [2]. Instead of digital "real-time modeling" they used an analog feedback loop to control and correct woofer cone movement. These were self-contained active speaker cabinets containing a 35W (later also available in 75W) amplifier and two or three speakers with the feedback mechanism controlling the woofer.
They did not have wifi or an always-on microphone, true, but the former is easily remedied (use a Raspberry Pi Zero or something similar) while the latter is more of an advantage than a disadvantage.
Apple's approach goes a fair bit beyond simple servo control (which only tends to work well for truly low-frequency content.
While Apple hasn't disclosed much about the particular details, it's bound to be in the same vein as Klippel's work, which doesn't use feedback as much as it monitors a few states as input to a feed-forward error-correcting mechanism. The net result is that distortion is lower, and it's much less limited with regards to the frequency range you can support.
That seems really lazy [edit: making you buy a whole second thing instead of just a speaker]. What will they do next? Sell iMacs instead of external monitors?
The other smart speakers didn't even have multi-speaker support from the outset, much less slaves.
Plus slaves in the same room don't really make much sense. I want my sound to be balanced. It's not really going to balance well if I have a tiny speaker on one side of the room and a big one on the other.
There’s no discussion here about the device as a voice assistant.
While I’m sure the audio quality is excellent, I think I’d rather use cheap Amazon or Google devices to build a home automation system, for example. The cost of a multi room assistant is too high with the HomePod.
People are also starting to work on open source solutions:
Since they advertise this is made for music and comes with a woofer and 7 tweeters, it would be useful if the specs offered some details like frequency response, harmonic distortion, sensitivity and power usage.
No, the choice is between having and not having one.
We've turned off all of the "assistants" in our home - in our phones, laptops, etc. We find they provide nothing of real value, and the invasion of privacy is not acceptable.
Well, you turned off all the obvious always-on listening devices. In reality any phone can be listening all the time without you knowledge. As to whether they are actually listening is another question, accusations on the subject fly [1] and [2] get rebutted [3] all the time [4] but it is hard to prove or disprove either thesis.
On the subject of the usability of these 'assistants' I mostly do agree except for the possibility to use voice commands which can sometimes be useful. Fortunately that option does not need an always-on internet connection to some faraway mothership and is easy to implement in free software, e.g. [5].
Question: Is there a "smart device" in existence which can function well without requiring a remote agent on the backend who watches you? Where do I find such a thing?
The HomePod is probably the closest you’ll get. Voice recognition for the trigger word happens on device, and requests are anonymized using differential privacy. iMore goes into more detail. Apple has no use for watching you, so they don’t. Amazon wants your shopping habits, Google wants anything they can use in advertising.
What? Buffering AT real time isn't buffering at all. Storing data faster than real time is the definition of buffering, no? I can't make sense of that statement.
Early internet movie players typically buffered the video stream at whatever speed was available until the software was reasonably sure it would be able to play the full (where ‘full’ at the time typically was less than a minute) video without stuttering.
Those old enough probably remember RealPlayer, which was famous for buffering at slower than, often a lot slower than real time.
I think modern video players still take the same approach, but if bandwidth is high enough, they need very little time before they start playing.
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[ 2.5 ms ] story [ 133 ms ] thread"HE-AAC (V1), AAC (16 to 320 Kbps), protected AAC (from iTunes Store), MP3 (16 to 320 Kbps), MP3 VBR, Apple Lossless, AIFF, WAV, and FLAC"
Not having to go to your computer and enabling AirPlay and selecting an album is kind of the point of a home assistant ;).
Presumably there would have to be some kind of Spotify "app" running on the HomePod, to access Spotify without a phone, but there is no SDK for that yet
What the hell is this? After some thinking I realised it must be a date, 2018-02-09, but this is not clear. Do they think it looks cool or something?
Just adding a .18 or even better making it 2.09.18 would have made things easier and I can't believe that it would have hurt the page design that hard.
I mean it's usually 9/11, not 9.11.
Apple need to get back to releasing things soon after announcement.
Faster than real-time. That IS fast!
They did not have wifi or an always-on microphone, true, but the former is easily remedied (use a Raspberry Pi Zero or something similar) while the latter is more of an advantage than a disadvantage.
[1] http://www.extra.research.philips.com/hera/people/aarts/_Phi...
[2] http://hifipig.com/philips-motional-feedback-speakers/
While Apple hasn't disclosed much about the particular details, it's bound to be in the same vein as Klippel's work, which doesn't use feedback as much as it monitors a few states as input to a feed-forward error-correcting mechanism. The net result is that distortion is lower, and it's much less limited with regards to the frequency range you can support.
[1] http://www.audioxpress.com/article/louder-faithful-and-consi...
[2] https://www.klippel.de/fileadmin/_migrated/content_uploads/A...
https://www.theverge.com/2017/10/4/16418944/sonos-airplay-2-...
(AFAIK AirPlay 1 requires dedicated hardware support.)
(I think you need the Sonos app installed, but, you don't need to use it)
That seems really lazy [edit: making you buy a whole second thing instead of just a speaker]. What will they do next? Sell iMacs instead of external monitors?
Plus slaves in the same room don't really make much sense. I want my sound to be balanced. It's not really going to balance well if I have a tiny speaker on one side of the room and a big one on the other.
While I’m sure the audio quality is excellent, I think I’d rather use cheap Amazon or Google devices to build a home automation system, for example. The cost of a multi room assistant is too high with the HomePod.
People are also starting to work on open source solutions:
https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/aiforeveryone/mycroft-m...
We've turned off all of the "assistants" in our home - in our phones, laptops, etc. We find they provide nothing of real value, and the invasion of privacy is not acceptable.
On the subject of the usability of these 'assistants' I mostly do agree except for the possibility to use voice commands which can sometimes be useful. Fortunately that option does not need an always-on internet connection to some faraway mothership and is easy to implement in free software, e.g. [5].
[1] http://www.telegraph.co.uk/technology/2017/10/30/facebook-li...
[2] http://www.bbc.com/news/technology-41802282
[3] https://lifehacker.com/facebook-isn-t-recording-your-convers...
[4] https://www.startpage.com/do/dsearch?query=facebook+phone+li...
[5] https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/aiforeveryone/mycroft-m...
Apple isn't in the business of giving me adverts for soap if I tell my roommate it is their turn to get more Irish Spring.
What? Buffering AT real time isn't buffering at all. Storing data faster than real time is the definition of buffering, no? I can't make sense of that statement.
Those old enough probably remember RealPlayer, which was famous for buffering at slower than, often a lot slower than real time.
I think modern video players still take the same approach, but if bandwidth is high enough, they need very little time before they start playing.
I also don't want my speaker to "run my smart home" or anything like that.
You can get a quality 200W subwoofer for $150. Pair that Mackie or JBL studio monitors for another $150.
One homepod costs $349. And you need TWO for stereoscopic sound.
Its just another vanity item, much as all Apple products of late - they add no real value.