Does Your iPod Music Stop Playing?

Sometimes teaching a class goes off without a hitch. There are other times when issues come off. For me, more often than not, they’re technical. If it’s not troubles programming the heating and cooling unit (I miss the old switches – heat/cool, and the dial that you adjust that points to the temperature you want), it’s an issue with the stereo (or the device I’m playing music from). Sometimes I really miss the days where all I had to do was insert a cassette tape and start class. It was so easy. And I always had dubbed backups. Now I have to set the stereo to the proper mode, choose the playlist and hope that when I hit play, music starts playing. Recently, I had a situation where the music would play for about a minute and then stop. It wasn’t as if I bought this iPad last week. I’ve owned this iPad Mini 4 (2015) for more than a year and have never had this problem before.

This drove me nuts. I tried to play a song again. Same thing.  At that point, I continued class without music. Afterward, I went online and started looking for suggestions on what to do. I tried closing all open applications, rebooting again, still nothing. Then I found a post that mentioned notifications as the possible culprit. I’m not a fan of those anyway. Whenever headline news flashes up on a notification, there is a temporary break in the music. And this is distracting.

I went into settings. And the list of items that had notifications defaulted to on were tremendous. App Store, Calendar, Calm App, FaceTime, Games, Home, Instagram…you get the picture. There were ten more. I turned notifications off on all of them and guess what? My music started playing normally again. I’m not sure which notification was the music-stopping offender. But I’m content for now to leave them off so my music plays uninterrupted AND I have less distraction.