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jason2811

macrumors 6502a
Original poster
May 8, 2006
729
2
For whatever reason, my iPhone won't play music through the speaker. Rather than the normal volume controls showing up, instead there is just the play, ff, and rewind buttons as if the phone is connected to an external speaker. When I hit the little source button it shows that the phone is connected to "dock connector" but I have no idea what that means because the phone isn't connected to anything. When I plug headphones in the phone doesn't recognize them sometimes until I pull them out and plug them in again. Any way to fix this or is this a hardware issue for Apple to fix? Pics attached.

bChl7.png


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Same Exact Problem as Jason - restore and reset didn't work.

Hi Jason - thanks for your post. I'm having the same EXACT problems as you. I restored my iphone yesterday and that didn't work. Have you figured this out? Has anyone else figured this out?

Thanks for your help!

Andrew
 
Customer service

I called Apple customer service and they had me on the phone for an hour with a final resolution to return the phone to Apple... This was after a reset, restore and plugging earbuds in and out, docking, undocking, Bluetoothing, unBluetoothing... Well you get the idea. Apple FIX THIS!
 
So the external speaker on my iphone wasnt working and I found this thread on google. Seems like this is a common problem with no real solution. I ended up fixing mine so I signed up so I could share my solution.

The symptoms my phone experienced:

- Music would not play thru external speaker
- No text/email tones thru external speaker under normal use though I could get text tone/email tone to play thru the speaker by changing the tone in Settings
- No sound when dialing phone numbers under normal use though I could get the phone keypad to make beeps when simultaneously playing music thru AppleTV via airplay
- Airplay options showed AppleTV and dock connector (when at home)
- Headphones worked fine

As noted, I knew the external speaker was working. I tried to clean the dock connector and headphone jack using canned air and electronic contact cleaner, no luck. Tried repeatedly plugging in and removing the dock connector and headphones, no luck. Reset, restored, no luck.

How I fixed mine: I borrowed a friends FM transmitter that uses the dock connector to play music thru car radio. I set it up in my car, and plugged the phone in; the phone recognized the accessory and played thru the radio. I let it play for about 20 minutes and shut off the car then rebooted the phone. It's worked properly since. Not sure if rebooting mattered, and pretty sure any accessory that plays audio and connects via the dock connector will work.

Good luck!
 
Thank you mikewhy. Tried ur fix and it worked without resetting the iPhone. Strangely when I first plugged the iPhone in to a dock the iPhone said this device is not supported and immediately started playing through the iPhone speaker. Funny cos I always play music through the dock?
Anyway thanks to mikewhy.
 
I wanted to let everyone know that the car media player trick worked for me on an ipad3 which had the same symptoms. I went through every sound troubleshooting procedure I could find and never thought of actually using the dock connector to play sound/music.

All I did was go out to my truck, plugged in the doc/USB cable to my radio, started up Pandora and got music through my truck speakers. I unplugged the cable while the music was playing and it continued to play through my iPad speakers. Awesome deal!
 
Dock solution worked for me as well.

Had this problem for a week or so. Plugged the iphone directly into the dock, played music through the dock, pulled off the phone and it worked!
 
Thanks a lot.

So the external speaker on my iphone wasnt working and I found this thread on google. Seems like this is a common problem with no real solution. I ended up fixing mine so I signed up so I could share my solution.

The symptoms my phone experienced:

- Music would not play thru external speaker
- No text/email tones thru external speaker under normal use though I could get text tone/email tone to play thru the speaker by changing the tone in Settings
- No sound when dialing phone numbers under normal use though I could get the phone keypad to make beeps when simultaneously playing music thru AppleTV via airplay
- Airplay options showed AppleTV and dock connector (when at home)
- Headphones worked fine

As noted, I knew the external speaker was working. I tried to clean the dock connector and headphone jack using canned air and electronic contact cleaner, no luck. Tried repeatedly plugging in and removing the dock connector and headphones, no luck. Reset, restored, no luck.

How I fixed mine: I borrowed a friends FM transmitter that uses the dock connector to play music thru car radio. I set it up in my car, and plugged the phone in; the phone recognized the accessory and played thru the radio. I let it play for about 20 minutes and shut off the car then rebooted the phone. It's worked properly since. Not sure if rebooting mattered, and pretty sure any accessory that plays audio and connects via the dock connector will work.

Good luck!

Hi Mikewhy,

Thanks a lot. The fm transmitter I had, came in handy for this purpose. It worked. :)....
Thanks again...
 
I tried plug in to my car and after i plug out it worked but after awhile when i put in my headphone and plug out it had the same problem again. I tried a second time by restarting my phone and putting in my headphone . The same problem appear again. Any help please???,
 
I created a profile just to say thank you and confirm that the FM/Dock does actually work.. Thanks
 
Thank you so much!

Have been feeling emasculated that I could not get my Daughters iphone 4s to play music from speakers for over 6 months. The plug it into the car then remove ipod dock cable worked perfectly. SO pleased signed up to this forums to thank you and all your contributors!
Best Regards, bagboy
 
Airplay docking

I had the same problem using the latest IOS software. My phone only gave me two options - docked or my airplay device. I docked my phone on the airplay device then looked at the options. The option to go back to iPhone reappeared. I undocked the phone and now I have a volume control on my phone again.
 
Finally Worked

Wow! thanks so much for this post….i had tried so many options and i even visited apple geeks at stores and nothing resolved. Finally i undocked my iPhone from car speakers…my iPhone is now back to itself….thanks so much for posting this.
 
speaker

After using the "plug into car" and reset method we found that plugging in headphones set the system back and could not play out of speakers again. So i took to apple store and under EU legislation they have to replace faulty units so i got a new iphone 4s.
We did this again on another iphone 4s when the same problem happened. this was on a unit some 4 or more years old. some benefits to the EU after all it seems!
 
I couldn't get sound either

But I tried docking it on my daughter's stereo and although it wouldn't play on her device, my speakers reactivated like magic!
 
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