Bluetooth Magic

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Senecio

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#243194 30-Nov-2018 08:54

Can anyone explain how this works.

Jump in my car in the morning and load up a podcast to listen to on the journey (connected by old fashioned bluetooth, not Carplay in case that matters). Spend the day in the office and at some point in a boring meeting I close all background apps including the podcast app. I know I shouldn't close background apps these days but its an old habit that's hard to kill.

Jump back in my car at the end of the day and the podcast just starts playing, picking up exactly where I left of in the morning. When I get home in the evening I check my background apps and the podcast app is not running in the background.

How does it know to play the podcast when the app isn't running? Is this some king of black magic going on?

SaltyNZ

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#2137029 30-Nov-2018 09:11

What would be even more magical would be if it could not decide to start playing whatever random thing, every time I get into the car. Just because I turned the car on doesn't mean I am definitely in the mood to be blasted whatever song is alphabetically first in my library.

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SheriffNZ

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#2137032 30-Nov-2018 09:25

SaltyNZ:

What would be even more magical would be if it could not decide to start playing whatever random thing, every time I get into the car. Just because I turned the car on doesn't mean I am definitely in the mood to be blasted whatever song is alphabetically first in my library.

Yes, I know exactly what song Spotify is going to tell me is going to be my most listened to this year. It's going to be the first song I added to my main spotify play list and is therefore the song that plays everytime I play that playlist (a lot) on my Bose wifi speaker.

In saying that, I still think it's a good song.

SpartanVXL

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#2137059 30-Nov-2018 09:57

Is it loading them into the music playback list? Not sure the exact term for it, you can see the widget in the control centre (swipe from top right) with whats currently playing. Any app with access to music/files seems like it can load a new song and it stays there even if the app is closed.

JPNZ

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#2139444 4-Dec-2018 22:04

That’s a really interesting question. What phone is the OP using. I ask because on my old iPhone 7 if I had Bluetooth running in my car listening to an album and I forced closed the app at work then when I jumped back into the car it would access my phone and play from the start of my main playlist.

With my new XR as you stated it carries on in the song from exactly where it left off. I like it!!

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ANglEAUT

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#2139483 5-Dec-2018 00:43

There are enough people out there complaining about exactly this same issue, e.g. Reddit. There even are workarounds to "fix" this issue. This one has an additional Siri hack, if you want to try that. It would be wonderful to find out WTF is going on here.

I have a related problem. Same car, two phones; same iOS version, both with app1 & app2 loaded.

iPhone 5
- app1 stops & starts as instructed
- app2 pauses palyback for 1 sec & then continues playback
iPhone 6
- app1 pauses palyback for 1 sec & then continues playback
- app2 pauses palyback for 1 sec & then continues playback

WTF: if one app stays stopped, why can't both of them stop? Why does the same app behave differently on different hardware?

It would be nice if iOS exposed settings similar to this:

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MadEngineer

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#2139484 5-Dec-2018 00:54

“Close” the app that was playing the media, then swipe up from the bottom and hit play. The media will play with the app gone. You can demonstrate this with Spotify. Tapping next will even play the next track from the Spotify playlist without Spotify seemingly running. When you the open the app, it will appear as if it wasn’t even closed suggesting it’s actually open but not there to swipe away.

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Aredwood

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#2139486 5-Dec-2018 01:23

There was a previous thread, where someone said that some car headunits send the play command over the Bluetooth link once a device auto pairs.

So your phone thinks that you deliberately want it to play something. And it probably just sends the play command to the last used app that played audio or video. The playback app might also have a separate background process that handles the actual playback. Which is how playback is able to work without the main app loading.

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ANglEAUT

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#2139490 5-Dec-2018 01:33

Senecio: Can anyone explain how this works...

I believe a lot of it has to do with the tyranny of the default.

Car manufacturers want you to enjoy the wonderful sound system in their vehicle.
Radio manufacturers feel the same about their equipment as the vehicle manufacturers.
Apple wants you to use their hardware & software.

All three entities have a very strong incentive to pump out sound as loudly as possible "for you to enjoy". Thus all three enable the auto play feature without giving you the option to disable it. See linked posts in my previous comment. And previously, this was implemented so poorly, that it always played the alphabetically first song title in your library. At least now, they have the ability to resume the current audio from your last used audio app. I believe this is why it starts to auto play.

As to the fact that the application is not in your list of recently running apps, here is my guess. Apps have to be specifically coded to enable Carplay. That means they expose some sort of API that the car radio can access. The car audio does all the processing of audio playback and thus does not need to launch the app to do the playback.

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