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Eldorkable
Contributor I
May 27, 2023
Answered

My speakers/app doesnt want to play music from my phone anymore

  • May 27, 2023
  • 41 replies
  • 1626 views

I used to be able to play music i have stored on my phone and suddenly "this device" option has completly disapered as an option under any tab on the app.

 

I updated by phone and the app, i check permissions, all the file locrion stored on my phone are under music, nothing has changed from when i could play from my phone to now when i cant.

 

This is very frusting as there are some songs i have that arent availiable on streaming services. 

 

How do i fix it?

 

 

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Best answer by Airgetlam

Here’s the original announcement from May 4…

 

 

41 replies

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Ralpfocus
Prodigy III
October 18, 2023

@jgatie 

I assure you, after you initiate playback, you can turn the phone completely off, smash it with a hammer, throw it in a fish tank, run it over with a steamroller, and the music keeps playing.  There are no background processes going on, the Sonos devices stream from the source all by themselves, the app is merely a controller. 

I agree totally; in every case you can turn the controller off once the stream has started except in the very special situation where you are using the “On this mobile Device”. Which is the case under discussion here. I also agree that the “normal” controller has no part to play in the ongoing stream. 

I am simply speculating that the controller on Android has some additional code associated with playback of music stored on the phone itself, possible as a set of subroutines or a linked spawned process. This extra software might be some form of cut down HTTP server that the Sonos device communicates with. But even in this case it is still the Sonos device that is managing the process, whatever is running on the phone is only responding to the Sonos device.

 As said earlier

My rational for this thought is a) that Sonos apparently state that this feature is holding the Controller software back, b) i am sure that I have seen on these forums that the PC version of the controller spawns a background process for accessing files on a PC and c) why would android run by default a background HTTP server so that the outside world could connect to your phone without you knowing

Plus on Android you can swipe off the Sonos App and the music keeps going playing as you would expect - however if you then force stop the Sonos app then after approx 30 seconds the stream stops and if you are looking at a controller on another device you get a message along the lines of “Unable to play '4th Of July' - the connection to phone name was lost.”
    

 

 

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