Odd sound issue - plays with headphones but not iphone speaker

[bblais]

So theres an odd sound issue where I can play the music if I have my headphones connected to my phone but it is silent when I want to play on my iPhone speaker. Is there something that I'm missing?

[seisiuneer]

@bblais What specific program that uses abcjs are you using for the playback?

I just tried my iPhone 14 Pro Max running the latest version of iOS 26.3 and when I use my ABC Transcription Tools, it plays just fine independent of the mute switch setting.

On the iPhone, the volume in headphones and from the speaker are independent. Might it just be that you don't have the volume turned up when using the speaker?

I just connected a set of Bluetooth headphones to my iPhone and I can switch between them and the music plays in all cases.

[bblais]

Yes, I tried again and it worked. really weird, because I went through those steps you mentioned. thanks!

[samuelbradshaw]

Is your phone on silent? Depending on how MIDI playback is triggered, some browsers treat MIDI playback as system sounds rather than media, which makes it so you can't hear the MIDI when your phone is on silent.

[seisiuneer]

iOS sometimes disables the audio playback on mobile Safari browser tabs when switching tabs or switching away from Safari to another app.

I have code specifically in my ABC Transcription Tools that tries it's best to catch this happening and make sure the audio can play again when the tab is visible, but it won't catch every case every time.

For other tools, if they don't specifically have that code, it can happen quite often.

Regarding @samuelbradshaw comment on MIDI playback, abcjs doesn't use MIDI externally, it only uses it internally to build an event list and then does all the audio rendering completely within abcjs itself using per-note instrument audio samples, so what you describe is almost certainly not the issue, at least as far as abcjs-based web tools. From the browser's point of view, it's just playing an audio stream.

[paulrosen]

Is your phone on silent? Depending on how MIDI playback is triggered, some browsers treat MIDI playback as system sounds rather than media, which makes it so you can't hear the MIDI when your phone is on silent.

That is my guess, too. I've seen that before.