Question

Is there a setting on the iPhone app to have the music pause when a call comes in?

  • 21 December 2014
  • 11 replies
  • 1087 views

I am curious if there is a setting in the iPhone app, or on the iPhone itself, to have the music pause or mute when a call comes in.

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11 replies

Well I don't know but I would like to. Surprised you got no replies. I just got two Sonos 1 speakers. They sound GREAT but I just had two phone calls and had to lock myself in the bedroom to take the calls. The music is streaming from my phone. Which normally mutes when a call comes in. Somehow the SONOS app circumvents this.
Unfortunately, no, there isn't a setting. Apple reserves that for their own music player, but doesn't extend it out to other apps, currently.
Wow, I sure hope not! That would be as bad as using a Bluetooth speaker. No thanks!
Chicks - I am not sure what you mean. How would "temporary mute" impact you in a negative way?
Userlevel 7
Badge +17
With Bluetooth the music stops, so if the phone was streaming into other rooms that music would stop everytime a call was taken, continuous on/off music would drive other listeners nuts!!
But giving users the choice, always sounds good to me ;O)
Any update on this? Really frustrating in a studio apartment having music blaring and no way to pause it automatically. Wish it was an option to mute when a phone call comes in. I understand now that I can push the button on the speaker, but still feels like a relay race experience.
scott_t,

Since I have no idea what Sonos is working on, and they tend not to share the list until they're actually released, I tend to like to do thought experiments on how the feature could be conceivably done.

This one's a bit complex for me, as the phone isn't actually "playing" the content. The phone (well, the app on the phone) is a remote control that tells the speaker where to go to get the stream, and then just gets updates from the speaker when the stream changes. Unless, of course, the music itself is on the phone, in my case "on this iPhone" I think is what it's called. I actually tend to use my NAS as a source, but I've used the "on this iPhone" in the past.

The benefit of the speaker controlling what is playing is that the controller app itself doesn't need to be running in order for music to be playing. You give the speaker the instructions, and the remote control (the app) can disappear, and music keeps playing.

So that leaves me with some sort of system interrupt that I'd have to insert into iOS (or Android, which I'm very unfamiliar with). Do I have the ability to identify a telephone ring? ie. does Apple expose this to anything outside of their own system? If so, iOS my controller app required to be running to catch that interrupt? And should I interrupt playback for any sound that is generated by the phone? Text Messages notifications? Game Playing sound?

The nice thing about a bluetooth connection is that it's on a system level that it grabs anything, and just pushes that content to an outside bluetooth connection. It doesn't have to discriminate, so that if a call comes in, all sound already on the phone is muted in order for the phone to play the call. But that's not the case with a Sonos play stream, since the music is playing on a speaker, not on the phone.

I don't see an easy way to do this. Is it possible? I'd assume anything is possible, until a programmer tells me that it isn't. But I'd suspect that this request is, in the parlance of the programmers I know, "non-trivial", which I interpret as "really hard, and will take a long time".

That doesn't mean that it's not being done. But in my humble opinion, it's not a likely scenario, since I don't expect that the priority is that high for the coders at Sonos. I've been wrong before, and will be wrong again. And I could be wrong here, too. But I don't have high hopes for this occurring, even if I would find it convenient.

I like the suggestion. I fear the cost of implementation.
If this is ever done, it had better be optional.
While I agree wholeheartedly with you, Kumar, I also am wary of the whole "optional" issue. When designing the UIX for many of the games I've worked on, there's always been a desire to add one more feature, and make it optional, which ends up cluttering the interface, and eventually making it relatively unusable for the neophyte user. You end up with an interface that's just too complex, and the "standard user" (Sonos' main market, I suspect) no longer can understand or use it.

This is why I suspect many of the suggestions made in these boards aren't implemented. They're all good ideas, but at the end of the day, they'd confuse people who aren't knowledgeable users like some of us are.

I tend to think of people like my mother as being Sonos' target audience. And I spent a lot of years being her tech support. Simpler was better for her. It needed to just work.
Userlevel 5
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I'd be surprised to see them bother with it. After all, calls/texts disrupting your media was a part of their "You're Better Than This" ad campaign.
Oh, I agree; what I like about Sonos is the entire less is more approach. Tech should make lives easier, not more stressed trying to get it to work.