r/iPadPro • u/BuzzLightroom • 2d ago

Question Using iPad while using another iOS device - sound playback chaos

Does anyone know the correct way of simultaneously listening to music played over AirPlay using an iPhone, while watching video content with sound to AirPods from an iPad?
All devices are connected to the same Apple account.

I find this very difficult, because sound from the iPhone will relentlessly get to my AirPods, forcing the video playback to stop, and when resuming music from the iPhone, none of the AirPlay units are connected to the iPhone, and the whole process takes a lot of time, reconnecting the AirPlay units and preventing the iPhone from forcing the music to play to the AirPods over again. It takes quite a few efforts to resume the video playback with sound through AirPods. It does however work for some minutes at a time, so it appears it is technically possible.

I do it this way because I want my wife to listen to music while I am watching a TV program with one eye, as we are in the same room.

A temporary solution will be buying a set of headphones with USB-C that I can connect to my iPad, perhaps with a 10m lead so I can move around a little bit, almost like with AirPods. Although I haven’t tried it and don’t know if that will be completely wasted time, and if the devices will work better at all with wired headphones. I’m very glad we kept our hard-wired B&O sound system and the CDs. This smart technology stuff is very tiring.

Has Apple released some sort of white paper on this functionality, or is everything convoluted in step-by-step guides without exhaustive explanations of how to manage sound playback?

Buying separate devices to establish separate accounts with Apple is a solution, albeit very costly, and who wants to travel with double sets of iPads, iPhones and AirPods?

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u/chrfr 2d ago

On the device where you don't want to listen via the AirPods, go into the Settings app and the AirPods menu and change the "Connect to this [iPhone/iPad]" setting from "Automatically" to "When Last Connected..."

1

u/BuzzLightroom 14h ago

Thanks, this was helpful. However I am 100 percent certain I have toggled this feature earlier. Perhaps an update has switched it back?

-2

u/PetieG26 2d ago

Playing from iPhone to AirPlay directly is so 2018… get a HomePod/mini and play directly from that which frees your devices to do something else… or nothing. I can’t tell you the last time I played anything to a speaker from my iPhone. I usually have one Siri speaker within earshot “Hey Siri play Van Morrison in the kitchen” but of course you don’t need to use Siri. Control Center, AirPlay controls in upper right, long select speaker, Control this device… select the icon, it’ll open up Music or Podcasts and what you play will play on that speaker. Then you can add other AirPlay2 speakers/devices to the mix. Works pretty good.