Music stops playing on MS Surface when screen turns off.

Anonymous
2012-12-20T21:34:16+00:00

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.

Windows for home | Other | Music, photos, and video

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  1. Anonymous
    2014-01-22T23:24:43+00:00

    Greetings,

    When the screen turns off while music is playing in Xbox Music, are you playing Local music, Streaming, or does it do it with both?

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  2. Anonymous
    2014-01-24T01:27:43+00:00

    It happens with both, but the behavior is inconsistent and seems situational. Sometimes I will listening to local files (files in SkyDrive that are "available offline") and playback will be fine. Other times the same local files will not advance between songs once the screen goes black OR the songs will only advance after a long delay (30secs+ of no playback).

    But the behavior is much more common when streaming. I will reiterate though, if I time out of a WiFi connection that requires some sort of verification to reestablish the connection, all functionality of the Xbox music ap ceases, even if I reconnect to the network. The ap will stop searching, won't be able to play even local songs, and just looses all functionality.

    Hope this helps.

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  3. Anonymous
    2014-02-14T00:04:36+00:00

    It looks like this conversation has been going on for over a year with no resolution. I just tried Amazon cloud player and it stopped when the screen blanked.

    When can we expect a fix?

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  4. Anonymous
    2014-02-14T01:48:40+00:00

    I've also noticed that it matters if my Surface 2 is plugged in the power adapter or not. If it's plugged in to a power source, playback is more likely to continue once the screen goes black. If not plugged in, playback is more likely to stop between songs without advancing. Ideally, playback would be uninterrupted once the screen goes black, even when a power source is not plugged in.

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  5. Anonymous
    2014-02-16T16:58:29+00:00

    Here's the issue. There is no Amazon Cloud Player app for Win8, so when you play music from the Amazon cloud on the Surface, it plays through the web browser.  The web browser behaves as expected, when the Surface goes to sleep it stops playing the music, or even if you switch to a different app.

    It's really up to Amazon to develop an app that will work on Surface and I guess they won't do that for competitive reasons.

    I have a few workarounds.

    1. Buy a device that does support the Amazon cloud app. Any ipod, iphone or Android device should work. (I just bought a Kindle Fire on ebay for $70 for this purpose)
    2. Use the power options on the Surface to create a power scheme that never goes to sleep even when you close the lid. I created a custom scheme and called it "Music". You should probably keep the Surface plugged in when you're using this so as not to drain the battery. You must also stay on the Amazon page and not switch away from it.

    3.  From a quick test it looks like the web-based Spotify app behaves better than Amazon Cloud player, I'm still checking it out, if nothing else then #2 will work for Spotify as well as other apps that have this limitation.

    I'm amazed that Microsoft wasn't able to tell us this.

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