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I have a Microsoft Surface. I have my mp3's in my default Music folder. When I play an album, a song will play but it will not play the next song if the screen has turned off. I always need to hit the power button again to turn the screen back on in order to play the next song. This makes this device useless as a music player as I have to turn it back on every few minutes. Often the song will start skipping as well when the screen turns off. This is for the Music app but also any other music playing apps I've tried such as Music Info. And please don't tell me this is by design. It is not by design. It's a bug. It would be nice to know when this will be resolved. Playing an MP3 is a basic function that should just work out of the box. It really can't be that hard. If a $30 mp3 player can do it I sure expect my $700 tablet to.
Locked Question. This question was migrated from the Microsoft Support Community. You can vote on whether it's helpful, but you can't add comments or replies or follow the question.
I am seeing this with various Windows 8 devices (I have a Surface Pro, a Dell PC and HP Laptop) with all the music apps I have used - the Win8 Music app, Zune, Pandora, I-Heart-Radio, etc. Screen goes to sleep, music stops. Screen wakes up, music resumes. I tried setting the PC to never sleep, so it only the screen that is sleeping.
i know not a complete answer, but one option is to stop the screen from going to sleep and maybe turning the brightness way down so it doesn't completely kill the battery. So, how to keep the screen from going blank since if you have your Surface synced to Exchange, it overrides your settings and sets it to how your office has it set (10 mins for me). If you press the Windows key- X if gets you to a menu of tools. Select Mobility Center and then in the dialog that appears turn Presentation Settings to ON. While this is on, your screen will stay on forever. Again, they need to fix this bug (although i don't have this happen when listening to music with xbox music, just with 3rd party apps), but it makes it so we can listen with other, better apps, until they fix this.
Greetings Gglazer,
Sorry to hear you've having and issue with the music app.
When your Surface is playing audio, the screen goes to sleep, and the song/track ends, how long do you wait to press the power button to turn the screen back on?
Does the next track start playing if you wait 2-3 minutes?
How often would you say the audio starts skipping once the screen goes to sleep?
Thank you for the reply. I've waited varying amounts of time. Probably close to a half hour at the longest. It does not try to play the next song until I wake up the Surface by pressing the power button. Now as a habit, i'll just reach over and turn it back on when i see it turn off out of the corner of my eye so I can keep the playback consistent. The audio skipping is a lot less than when I first received it when the until was released. When it happens a song will be playing and when the screen goes black and shortly after the skipping/distorted effect starts. When turning the screen back on the song resumes normal playback shortly after.
I get this and the screen doesn't go to sleep. If I leave music and go to another app it randomly stops.
