Phone starts playing podcast for no apparent reason

Question

This started yesterday, and I have no idea why.

I noticed my phone was playing a podcast. I've been using BeyondPod for a while, which is sometimes a bit wonky, but never had this kind of problem.

I tried playing and pausing, no dice. In fact, BeyondPod just played over the currently-running podcast. They played simultaneously. Same for any other music stuff, whereas usually when I start e.g. Pandora, the podcast or Music apps will pause themselves.

And it gets weirder. I restarted the phone. A few minutes later, podcast starts playing. Exact same podcast, playing from the beginning. I turn the phone off and on and it's good for a while, but then an indeterminate amount of time later, I notice the podcast playing again in my pocket (loud room, so I don't know how long it had been going).

It's also worth noting that the podcast plays from the phone's speakers, but if I plug in headphones it plays from them in addition.

I check my running services. I stop literally everything I can. I check battery usage. Nothing. I uninstall BeyondPod, and that doesn't help either.

The only change I've made to my phone was recently switching to ADW Launcher from the default. But even there, I reverted back to the original home, and I'm still having the problem.

Any ideas? This is getting really aggravating. It always plays the same podcast, always starting from the beginning.

Answer 1

I was having trouble with the original pre-installed "Music" app on my Droid X randomly playing music even though I never used the app. I tried factory resets, updates, cache wipes, data clears, everything I could think of. The only fix I found was to root the phone and use Titanium Backup to "Freeze" the Music app so that it no longer functioned.

It's possible that Music has latched on to one of your podcasts the same way that mine latched on to a song.

Note: this is not the new Google Music service and app that uses the cloud. This was the original Google Music app that came on the android phone. Shame on Google for re-using the same name for two different apps, and both buggy.