New HomePod Ambient Sounds and Sleep Timer Features

Hi this is Gary with MacMost.com. On this episode let me show you how you can use your HomePod to play ambient sounds to add atmosphere to a room or help you get to sleep at night.

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So I know a lot people use ambient sounds or white noise to help them get to sleep at night. Sometimes you have special machines that plays that stuff or use an app on your iPhone or something. When you look at the HomePod you think that would be an ideal device to do that. I mean it creates great sound. All you would need to do is have something to play. There are plenty of albums and things out there that you can get and already have been using your HomePod for this.

But Apple added a new feature recently with several ambient sound loops. It looks like they're kind of live streaming the loops. To use them all you need to do is ask your HomePod to play them. So you want to ask it specifically for ambient sounds, plural with an s at the end there. So you can say something like Hey Siri play forest from ambient sounds. Now playing forest from ambient sounds. Now you're in the forest. There are a whole bunch of different ones including a white noise one. Hey Siri play white noise from ambient sounds. Now playing white noise from ambient sounds. 

Now it seems the only way to control this is by speaking to Siri. But you actually can see what's going on if you look on your iPhone or it even works on your Mac as well. So if you bring up Control Center, then you go to Airplay you'll see the list of all the devices and you should see your HomePod there. Then you can see what ambient sound is playing. You can see it has the Artist listed as Apple and it's just called Stream. Now I can use the forward button to jump to the next in the list to see what they all are. But actually once you're doing that you can then go to the Music app and you look at what's playing. You'll see Currently Playing Ambient Sounds. Then if you tap on the Up Next list you'll see a list of all of them.

So you'd think you would be able to do the same thing on your iPhone but in fact you can't. You can't ask Siri to bring up these ambient sounds there. It won't work on your Mac. However if you go into your AirPlay settings here notice that you can use your Apple TV as other speakers for your HomePod. In that case it does work. I can have my living room Apple TV play the ambient sounds but I can't ask Siri on the Apple TV to do it. It won't work. So it seems like these ambient sounds are specifically tied to the HomePod.

But, of course, if you like this idea there's nothing that will prevent you from finding an ambient sound collection in Apple Music or purchasing one or ripping one from a CD into your music collection and playing that. It's just these special ambient sounds streams that Apple has just introduced. Hopefully Apple will introduce more than just this set.

Now another fairly new feature of the HomePod is the Sleep Control. So this works really well with ambient sounds or any music that you're playing. You can have your HomePod playing ambient sounds or some music and then tell it to go to sleep after a time. Hey Siri play ambient sounds. Here's forest from ambient sounds. When you do it like that it just picks one at random. Hey Siri set a sleep timer for fifteen minutes. Okay I'll stop playing in fifteen minutes. When it gets to the end of that it will slowly fadeout.