iOS 6: Music playback issues?

I'll agree with others - we still have this problem but have gotten used to it.

It is a shame that Apple's walled garden approach exists (in and of itself not a bad thing) but when combined with such horrid native apps to support Music Playback or even Email, makes for a bad user experience. Apple, if you are not going to do a decent job at building the default OS app that comes with the phone, then put some OS level hooks/config options in to allow users to chang the DEFAULT app for some things.

Once again, you are not addressing Apple when you post here, just volunteer users like yourself.

apple.com/feedback

I have reported this issue to Apple several times and I do not think that I am the only one. But I still use iOS 6.1 so I think it will never be solved in that old operating system. And for me it is sad to hear, that the issue is still present in iOS7 . It is such a basic feature of a music player, that it is hard to understand how this bug can even exist in the first place. Those who have this issue, do you use iTunes Match in your phone? Could this be part of the problem?

I'm running the latest iOS 7.* and it still happens on my 4S. I don't use iTunes match, never have. It's simply bad software.

I have already worked with 2nd teir support on this and it is a software problem they have no intention to fix. We went through a bunch of troubleshooting steps and what it came down to was that the music app still applies to the automatic memory dumps. the memory management system is flawed in that if too many things are getting opened it dumps everything except what you are currently using. The only request we can make and we should be making it every single day is to have them adjust settings so we can pick ONE app that never gets dumped. for me it would be the music app.

That's BS. It should tolerate getting dumped by occasionally (say every time it changes songs in the playlist), storing a tiny bit of nonvolatile information saying where in the playlist it was. Hundreds of other apps can remember where they were before getting dumped. It's a shameful embarrasment that the Music app can't. Hopefully the experience of tech support that you walked them through will eventually make it to the software folks that maintain the Music app and their management will alow them to spend the hour it takes to fix this.

It is absolutely incredible that the video app always remembers where it is in a movie even after memory dumps but the music app cannot. I pointed this out to them and begged them to make sure this gets passed up the ladder as far as it can go. I'm sure thay forgot about it as soon as we hung up the phone though.

lllGurulll wrote:

It is absolutely incredible that the video app always remembers where it is in a movie even after memory dumps but the music app cannot. I pointed this out to them and begged them to make sure this gets passed up the ladder as far as it can go. I'm sure thay forgot about it as soon as we hung up the phone though.

If I may chime in on the discussion....

From my own observation, I THINK the problem has been (and is) that there are several apps at work. I'm pretty sure there is one app that runs in the background to actually play the music (read the mp3, decompress and send it out to the headphone). That process seems to be aware of and seems capable of reading the playlist. I think there is a separate app that handles the UI and communicates with the background app (or maybe it's a single multi-threaded app, I'm not sure), but what does the playing is not what does the playlist updating.

I have seen several times the UI crashing/freezing/etc, and music still playing (several, sometimes many songs). At some point, the "player app" stalls because the UI app is not there to process the status updates so it stops then. I'll usually reboot at that point. When I reboot the phone or when I kill the music player app, or do some kind of voodoo dance to get it working again, when it does come back in, the "now playing" song is back several songs previous... In other words, the app that says "now playing song X" is the one that borks and playlist position is compromised.

The issue for me with my iPod Gen 5 was partly resolved with the iOS7 update. The car stereo does now remember the last tracks/playlist being played, however it randomly resets the shuffle and repeat settings when reconnecting.

pegaudet wrote:

From my own observation, I THINK the problem has been (and is) that there are several apps at work. I'm pretty sure there is one app that runs in the background to actually play the music (read the mp3, decompress and send it out to the headphone). That process seems to be aware of and seems capable of reading the playlist. I think there is a separate app that handles the UI and communicates with the background app (or maybe it's a single multi-threaded app, I'm not sure), but what does the playing is not what does the playlist updating.

I believe you could be right here as there must be a common service running in the background to allow for the unified audio output across multiple apps. Each app must tap into a common audio service which then outputs the audio and track information to the external device.

I believe the bug is in part to do with the coding of the foreground app. When I have been using Spotify (online or offline), I've had no issues what so ever. However, when using the default music app and a couple of others I've tested, the problem surfaces.

For me, the music app has always remembered the playlist. The problem is, that the location in playlist gets lost. It is especially annoying with shuffle songs, as I get the same songs in the same order in the evening, when I leave the office, that were playing in the morning, when I drove to the office. It is strange, that the music app is able to remember all the songs and their order it has played, but does not remember the position it stopped playing them.

i think what you described is exactly what we've been complaining about all along; it doesn't remember where it stopped. i don't think anyone said it didn't keep the playlists themselves intact.

yes, sorry. too bad there is still no solution for this bug.

no problem.