Playback stops

  • 17 June 2018
  • 5 replies
  • 1044 views

I’m having issues every time a text message or an app notification is received on my iPhone. It seems the only way to prevent this is by turning Bluetooth off.

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5 replies

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Are you streaming music from the phone itself? I'm guessing maybe the lock-screen playback controls for Sonos are interfering with notifications somehow. Suggest turning off "lock screen controls" in the Sonos settings page.
That's really odd. What are you playing on your Sonos when this occurs? Is it a stream from Pandora, or something on 'on this phone'?

The interesting this is that Sonos doesn't have Bluetooth, so turning off bluetooth on the phone must be changing something else.

The way the Sonos system works is all of the activity is on the speaker side of things. Your phone is only acting as a remote control, or in the case of 'from this phone' it's acting as a source for the speakers to get the music files from.

In all cases, the controller app tells the speaker "go get the music from this location", and the speaker does all the heavy lifting. The speaker connects to the specified location and grabs the stream to play. Your phone, generally speaking, isn't in the middle, but actually a tail, being updated with the name of the music being played by the speaker, for display.

The one minor exception is, as I've indicated, if your phone is where the music files are stored. Using the "on this phone" functionality tells the speakers to go get the music from the IP address from your phone, treating the phone as a NAS (Network Attached Storage) device. So, if there's something that potentially interrupts the stream of data from your phone to the speaker, it could cause the sound to be interrupted.

Most phones, in my limited experience, have enough bandwidth and processing power to be able to handle both a stream of music, and accepting a text message. You might want to double check a couple of things, though, which might potentially help. First, of course, make sure your phone is running the latest available OS. There's always the hope that a newer version of an OS does a slightly better job of multi-threading. You might also want to try rebooting the phone. It's possible over time that something got written to memory by an errant process that is causing an issue, a full reboot might clear that out. I have to admit that it took me a year or so after buying my first iPhone to figure out how to actually reboot it, rather than just shutting it off. Makes a difference, I learned :)

Not sure it would make a huge difference, but it might be worth making sure you're also running the latest version of the Sonos software, just as an extra check.
Thanks guys! This only seems to happen when I stream music from Apple’s Podcast and a new app called Overcast. It works fine when Streaming from SoundCloud. Will try your suggestions when I’m back home and will let you know how it goes.
* forget Overcast, I meant my music. Overcast is not available in Sonos.
Many of us wish it was....there's several threads on it. Hopefully, that issue will be resolved for Apple users when Sonos releases their AirPlay 2 implementation.