Music stops playing when my screen turns off

[thejackal]

Hi.  Not sure if this an issue with 4.0 or not but XMPlay no longer keeps the music playing when my screen turns off for power savings.  Is there a setting I missed to turn this back on?

[Rah3D]

Just getting the obvious out of the way here; are you sure it's just the screen turning off and not your entire computer going to sleep?

[thejackal]

Yeah, sure about that.  Bumping the mouse gets the monitor back on but XMPlay is still paused.

[Falcosoft]

Do you have a new PC with modern standby enabled?
You can check if this is the case by running the 'powercfg /a' command on cmd.
If the result is that 'Standby (S0 low power idle)' is active then it explains your problem.
Unfortunately with modern standby enabled PC's behave like smartphones so at the moment the screen is off it's in a low power state where all classic Win32 applications are suspended and only some Metro/Windows store apps can continue audio playback in the background.

I do not know why Microsoft thinks this is a good idea...

https://www.reddit.com/r/Surface/comments/qg5n15/windows_11_connectedmodern_standby_and_music/
https://superuser.com/questions/1208698/how-to-stop-windows-10-muting-audio-playback-when-screen-turns-off

[thejackal]

Here is my result:
The following sleep states are available on this system:
    Standby (S3)
    Hibernate
    Hybrid Sleep
    Fast Startup

The following sleep states are not available on this system:
    Standby (S1)
        The system firmware does not support this standby state.

    Standby (S2)
        The system firmware does not support this standby state.

    Standby (S0 Low Power Idle)
        The system firmware does not support this standby state.

Everything was operating normally months ago, so I'm not sure if updating to 4.0 or some Windows update helped cause this weird issue but I definitely was able to play music while the monitor turned off before.  I also don't know why Microsoft thought that was a good idea.

[Ian @ un4seen]

You could try enabling the "Keep monitor awake" option in the "Output" options page. That's primarily intended for when playing through the monitor, but perhaps it'll help in your case too?

[thejackal]

This does work, at least.  Must have missed that one when looking through the options.  Thanks a lot!