I know, I could have asked this at either of the two Android device forums to which I belong, the ones that have hundreds of separate sub-forums organized by manufacturer and then by model. But sometimes the signal-to-noise ratio gets too small in such specialized internet communities. There are just too many threads and it’s easy for questions to get lost.
OK, so the scene is chez me, about 90 minutes ago. I’m hunting around for my phone and I can’t find it, and I don’t want to turn on a light because my wife is asleep in our room, where I think I left the phone lying about somewhere. Flash forward about an hour; I’m sitting in the next room and I begin to hear music emanating from the bedroom. Earlier, we’d been watching some rock music documentaries, so I think my wife must have awakened and turned the TV back on. She calls me to ask where the music’s coming from.
Lo and behold, it’s emanating from my cell phone which I had left atop my dresser. Glad to have located the phone and sorry for the unintended wake-up call, I retrieve the phone. I stick in the earbuds and start listening–and it’s this dead groovy psychedelic-funk-soul mix. I have never heard any of this music before and I certainly don’t own it. I don’t know the songs or the musicians, but it all sounds like early psychedelic-era music such as I imagine I would have heard if I could have frequented the Fillmore in San Francisco, say early 1966.
It’s pretty obvious by this time that this isn’t some wrong-number call in which the originator is pushing a custom ringtone out to the receiving phone. So I try to figure out how my phone is playing this music–what app and so on. IHeartRadio isn’t running, and neither is TuneIn Radio. Nor is the music player running as far as I can see, and again, since I don’t even know who the artists are, I never intentionally downloaded this music or copied it from my computer. I know I didn’t have any alarm set that might have started playing a radio station.
Why don’t you just close the open apps one by one until the music stops? it could be a game, or a browser window, or, or… seems pointless to speculate.
There’s so many apps that could play music, it’s almost impossible for us to tell you.
I will tell you one situation where my phone played phantom music that was difficult for me to figure out, but the chances it was the same situation as you is pretty much all but zero.
My phone was running LogMeIn Ignition, which is a remote desktop app, connected to my PC at home. I kept hearing pieces of a ZZ Top song, I forget which one. Turns out my PC had, running in the background, the Origin EA gaming platform (kinda like Steam) and it was playing an ad occasionally with the ZZ Top song. This came through my phone via LogMeIn.
Go through the ringtones and alert sounds until you find it. Bet it’s there. Hard to say what might have triggered it, but you could go through the Notifications and Alerts until you find it assigned to something like “low battery warning” or such.
How long can a ringtone go on, though? This seemed to last about seven or ten minutes, and it wasn’t repeating itself the way an alert or ringtone would. Moreover, there were no missed calls or unread messages, and my battery had about 80% charge left on it.
Earlier yesterday I had been using iHeartRadio to listen to KCRW, our local NPR affiliate. Based on this I was almost ready to conclude that somehow my IHR app had spontaneously fired up and started playing KCRW again. They do play music at that hour, and occasionally the music they play is like what I heard last night. But not typically: their set lists are more likely to be centered on newer material with a sort of urban/techno/trance vibe. Anyway, I even downloaded the podcast and spotchecked it here and there to see if I could find any of this. No luck.
First I want to find out what music I heard last night–and then I would like to learn where to buy it.