Similar problem here Surface2 pro... music stops playing once you turn device screen to off... I don't want to have the screen on while listening to music. This should be basic? Using XBox Music
Music stops playing on MS Surface when screen turns off.
![](data:image/svg+xml, %3Csvg xmlns='http://www.w3.org/2000/svg' height='64' class='font-weight-bold' style='font: 600 30.11764705882353px "SegoeUI", Arial' width='64'%3E%3Ccircle fill='hsl(128, 8%, 22%)' cx='32' cy='32' r='32' /%3E%3Ctext x='50%25' y='55%25' dominant-baseline='middle' text-anchor='middle' fill='%23FFF' %3EA%3C/text%3E%3C/svg%3E)
Anonymous
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
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.
92 answers
Sort by: Most helpful
-
Anonymous
2014-04-04T01:27:54+00:00 -
Anonymous
2014-03-21T05:08:05+00:00 Well definitely isn't a solution yet
-
Anonymous
2014-03-20T23:52:39+00:00 There haven't been any updates posted to this thread for several weeks. Does that mean the problem has been fixed and I just don't know the solution? Just purchased a Surface 2 and experienced the same problem with music apps stopping when the screen goes to sleep. It doesn't matter that the computer sleep time is set to 1 hour, when the display sleeps (2 min) then the music stops. Waking the screen back up confuses the app.
-
Anonymous
2014-02-16T17:06:17+00:00 I'd like to note that my problem with playback not advancing when the screen goes black occurs with the Win8 modern aps (native music, Nokia mix, Pandora client, etch). The above discussion is not focused on the stopping playback of web based music players, though I agree that is a problem too.
-
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.
- 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)
- 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.