The HomePod has not yet arrived in Spain, but in the United States, users are already thinking about the restrictions imposed by Apple itself on its new speaker. This new speaker has incredible sound quality, but it lacks the possibility of making use of Line in input connections as well as sending sound to it through a bluetooth connection.
It is therefore a product that we have to use exclusively within the Apple ecosystem. It does not happen like the AirPods, which can be used on both iOS and Android through a bluetooth communication protocol.
All this reduces the HomePod's field of use to those users who have an active Apple Music subscription or who can send the sound to the HomePod using Apple's own AirPlay protocol. As you may already know, there are speakers on the market to which sound is not sent via bluetooth but via AirPlay, Apple's own operating mode.
What is AirPlay?
How does AirPlay work?
The operation is very simple and it is that we only have to have the HomePod connected to the same Wi-Fi network, in case we want to listen to anything from our Apple devices in it.
To share this content, once the HomePod and our device are connected to the same Wi-Fi network, we just have to go to the control center and press the button that says AirPlay. Once selected you just have to choose one of the devices that will appear in a list, selecting for example the HomePod.
Therefore, if you work in the Apple ecosystem you will not have problems and that is if you want to watch a movie on the Mac and hear it on HomePod you can do it. The problem comes when you have a HomePod and you have neither Apple Music nor any other Apple device. This is where the BabelPod, a device that is still in beta phase and that what it allows is that when connecting an audio input through a Line in or sending audio through bluetooth, it converts it to AirPlay to send it to the HomePod. It is based on a $ 10 Raspberry Pi Zero W which, along with other components, make up a smart solution that offers indirect bluetooth and line connectivity for the Apple wireless speaker.
Its developer also had to write the software to take a line or bluetooth connection and translate it into an AirPlay stream that the HomePod could understand. The BabelPod web interface is used to select both the audio source and the destination. Now they are looking at the problems that exist as a lag of almost two seconds, which is how long it takes for the device to convert the signal from one type to another, so it would not work for movies or video games. If you want to know more about this product you can enter the following website.