No more music on my Apple TV?!

[MattG]

All of a sudden my Apple TV decided it just doesn't want to play music anymore. I play a song, the timer starts to move, I hear nothing.

I am hearing:

• Sound from movie trailers
• The 'menu' sounds each time I go to a different screen
• The music that plays with the intro video when you turn Apple TV on

Just no music (or podcasts). I tried rebooting it and that didn't work, tried the "Reset Settings" option as well. WTF???

UPDATE: Ok, I can stream songs from my computer to the Apple TV, it just won't play anything stored directly on the Apple TV. This makes no sense.

 

[Advance The Man]

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How do you know if media you're watching or listening to is streaming or on your ATV?

 

[MattG]

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How do you know if media you're watching or listening to is streaming or on your ATV?

If I stream something from iTunes, using the AppleTV as the output, it plays and there's sound. If I play music that's simply been synced to the AppleTV and stored on its local hard drive, there's no sound.

 

[wbe858]

Volume

Is your volume in the music player all the way down. I just tried on mine you can still hear all those other sounds you mentioned. So basically im saying when you are playing music stored on it make sure you push the little + on the remote.

 

[MattG]

Is your volume in the music player all the way down. I just tried on mine you can still hear all those other sounds you mentioned. So basically im saying when you are playing music stored on it make sure you push the little + on the remote.

I've got the volume control setting in Options turned off, because I only want my audio receiver controlling the volume. The volume button on the ATV remote doesn't do anything for me.

 

[wbe858]

I've got the volume control setting in Options turned off, because I only want my audio receiver controlling the volume. The volume button on the ATV remote doesn't do anything for me.

Well then that was me hoping it was something simple. If you play with it long enough and still cant get it maybe try a factory restore? Ive never actually done it so idk what it would do to everything on the HD. So if you have time just in case you have to re-sync everything maybe try that.

 

[MattG]

Well then that was me hoping it was something simple. If you play with it long enough and still cant get it maybe try a factory restore? Ive never actually done it so idk what it would do to everything on the HD. So if you have time just in case you have to re-sync everything maybe try that.

Yeah, that's my last resort. I've been having some funky problems with this thing over the last couple of months. Twice now, it lost 'sync' with my computer, and I had to reenter that 5-digit code to connect the ATV to my iMac, and all the music and movies had to resync. Now this...

Thanks for the suggestions!

 

[Advance The Man]

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I can't tell if media is being recorded to my ATV hard drive or not. How do you know?

 

[wbe858]

Yeah, that's my last resort. I've been having some funky problems with this thing over the last couple of months. Twice now, it lost 'sync' with my computer, and I had to reenter that 5-digit code to connect the ATV to my iMac, and all the music and movies had to resync. Now this...

Thanks for the suggestions!

Yea they seem to get a bit moody from time to time. Anyway just post back the results if you have to do a restore and if it fixes it for future reference in case this happens to anyone else (or me).
Good luck.

 

[MattG]

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I can't tell if media is being recorded to my ATV hard drive or not. How do you know?

In iTunes, you can set the sync options for Apple TV. You can have it pull music from your hard drive onto the Apple TV's hard drive, and it will sync whenever you have iTunes open. Or, you can choose to sync nothing and simply stream music either directly from iTunes, or, ATV will pull it from iTunes (you have to add the streaming library on the ATV).

Basically, on the ATV, if you're playing music listed on the "My Music" screen, it's being stored locally on the ATV and there's no streaming going on. If you see it accessing the library on your computer, then it's streaming.

 

[iDrew]

Figured it out... I think

I had exactly the same problem. Everything was outputting sound except music played directly from my Apple TV (stuff I had already sync'd up). This happened immediately after I had restarted my ATV to fix another problem. Based on the above info, I switched the "Control Music Volume" option in the settings from off to on, and used the remote to increase the volume, which was all the way down for some reason. Then I switched the setting back to off and everything is working fine now. It seems the restart set the music output volume to zero. Once you increase it you can set the "Control Music Volume" setting back to off to control volume through your receiver. Weird little problem.