"Stop Playing" feature from Clock Timer doesn’t work in macOS Sonoma 14

"Stop Playing" feature from Clock Timer doesn’t work in macOS Sonoma 14.

It didn’t work in previous versions of macOS since the beginning of this year 2023, but it did work past year in the same machine.

I open the Clock App, go to Timer tab, but instead of selecting a sound for the timer I select "Stop playing", which should stop Apple Music, Apple TV and most music or video apps currently playing on the Mac.

I tested it with Apple Music, Apple TV, Spotify, TV streaming services under Safari and QuickTime videos.

I opened a Case ID with Apple support and provided screen video recordings captured with remote assistance by the superior Apple Support team on my computer to reproduce this issue in a very short video to be sent to the development team many months ago.

I installed every update to macOS. I reinstalled macOS from Time Machine and from scratch without restoring from Time Machine last time before upgrading to macOS Sonoma.

I used "safe mode". I tried creating new users with Administrative rights, with plain User rights and Guest options.

I reported this BUG already in "macOS Ventura 13" but no proper answer or fix has been provided by Apple Support so far except a variety of suggestions like "I don't think this will be fixed", "I didn't know there was such a feature", "If it is there and not working it will be removed in the next macOS version", "If it is there it should working as it is part of macOS itself", ...

The Support Team has already logged all kinds of debugging information using a special App (although unsigned by Apple) that they asked me to download and execute in my computer (instead of trying it themselves in their own computers) and I attached the files as requested, including screen recordings, which were supposed to be forwarded to the development team, and expected to be fixed among a succession of macOS updates that never fixed it, and now waiting for Sonoma to finally discover it hasn’t been fixed either using a clean install. The Case ID is still open, but Apple Community threads are closed in much less time than this case will need to be fixed or solved by removing this feature.

There are many other user’s reports about this problem, but nobody can respond to them now in Apple Discussions as thread opened 3 weeks ago seem to be old enough so Apple can close threads to prevent further comments or additions. One of the threads I found about this problem is this one:

- Stop Playing on Mac Clock App Not Working - Apple Community

- Posted on Dec 14, 2022 9:40 PM - Mac Studio, macOS 13.1

I use this feature “every day” at night since I go usually go to sleep with music or movies and I don’t want to wake up in the middle of the night but sudden explosions and increasing sound levels inside a movie after half an hour.

I’m experiencing this problem on a standard Mac Mini M1 2020 since 2022 as far as I can remember.

This feature works on iPad and iPhone as expected, but it doesn’t work on macOS, and I only watch movies on macOS, not iOS or iPadOS.

I ask this feature to be fixed (or removed) as Apple Support told me since I reported it, but I hope Apple does not leave it hanging there while broken and unusable.

I don’t want to use alternative methods like allowing macOS to go to sleep after a while even while playing media in full screen, because the only exception I want it to go to sleep after a while is when I go to sleep and I setup a Timer to “Stop Playing” after 15 or 30 minutes depending on how much tired I am when I go to sleep. It was easy to do once I discovered that feature was there, and I can even ask Siri to do it and setup a Timer to go to sleep without even opening the Clock App, but it just doesn’t work as it did before.

It has nothing to do about portability of the App from iOS to macOS or whatever some uninformed users respond, because that feature was working in macOS for me last year, but it just stopped working at the beginning of this year, and now almost a year since me and other users reported it.

I just post this in Apple Community forum so people can have a trace of this bug after other threads are being closed by Apple without a fix or proper response.

If you’re also experiencing this problem, please leave a comment here.

If this feature is working for you, please include macOS version you are using and what kind of computer you have (iMac Intel, iMac M1-2, Macbook, Mac Mini and so on).

Thank you.