r/amazonecho • u/Montesquieu9000 • 15h ago
Question Alexa Multi Room Music Issues: Solved?
I've had Echos for about five years, and a persistent issue I've had is Alexa Echo devices losing the ability to play multi-room music. Most problematic is the "everywhere" group, where every Echo device is included. I've done a lot of research, and many of the solutions involve deleting the group, re adding it, and hoping the issue is resolved. It seems like half the time, the solution works, and the other half of the time, it does not.
Well, recently I bought a new router after upgrading my internet provider to fiber internet. All heck broke loose with my old router with the new ISP and the first thing to break was multi room music. And it stayed broken. I got a different router, which changed nothing.
No matter what I did-delete the group, re add it. Make sure the alexas are all on the same network. Make sure they are all on the same frequency (5Ghz). Nothing. NONE of my music groups worked-I have one for "upstairs," which runs the main floor of the house and has 5 Echos plus one Echo subwoofer on it. No dice.
The music would only play on one speaker or some speakers: all of the speakers worked individually, but the Echo Show devices would not join the party.
What did work, finally, was deleting the multi room music group and then making new groups that ONLY included one new device at a time. My Echo Show devices refused to play music-they would just play the graphics of the song on Spotify, or the visual "tile" for the station I was listening to on Tunein, but no music. So that was the first thing I did: I made a group with the Echo Show 8 and then added 1 Echo Dot that always played music.
Sure enough, that "group" worked. So then I made another group and added another known good Echo Dot. That worked. So I made another group and added the other Echo Show 8 that never wanted to play music. It worked! Soon enough, I had all my Echo devices in my main floor of my house added into a group, and it all worked.
Then, I added my one terrible Echo Show 5 that I paid $20 when it was on sale (they are so terrible) that's on my night stand. I named the group "Everywhere," and it DID NOT WORK! The Everywhere group refused to play music. It just would not.
But I was able to switch back to my Upstairs group and it worked fine still. HOW BIZARRE. I ran upstairs, and sure enough, that god awful but $20 device had jumped off the 5ghz network and back onto the regular network: I told it to forget the regular network and get back on the 5ghz network. And now the Everywhere group works.
I don't know if I re established some kind of link between the devices doing things this way-my intention was to find the one Echo that was being broken and messing up the link. It turns out that there were NO broken devices except for one on my 2nd floor, and my Alexas were refusing to play group music for absolutely no reason. My old "upstairs" group did not include the Alexa that was killing my everywhere group, but before I had to redo everything, my upstairs group was dead.
I turned them on, I turned them off, I put them on different networks, I spoke to different speakers. Nothing would work. Until I made a small, two speaker group, and then a 3 speaker group, and then a 4 speaker group, and so on. I did make sure that they were all on the same network bandwidth first, but I am not sure that this mattered. They were always on the same network-that never changed.
After the link has been re established, I saw that the Echo Show in my kitchen has jumped off the dedicated network, it has joined a network with a different name and a 2.4 bandwidth, but it doesn't care. It works just fine. The multi room groups that this device belongs to work, the device works, and it's not on the same network (the network is on my router, but this never changed)I can and will go in and make it forget the forbidden network, but I don't know if it matters.
Hope this works for others-I am sure I will have to re test this theory and iterative method of fixing multi room music, as this seems to be a feature of Alexa devices.
I wonder if this fixed my "amazing" Echo Link Amp that almost never broadcasts music...
