Media Player stuck on 00:00 (randomly) when opened

Question

My usual listening habits are to listen to podcasts with Doggcatcher sometimes followed by listening to some music (currently using PlayerPro) (on my Samsung Galaxy S4) while driving. Periodically, when I close Doggcatcher and open PlayerPro, and I select a track to play, the track looks like it is going to start to play.

However, although the timer starts at 00:00, and the Play button changes to the Pause button, there is no sound. Often the timer will tick over to 00:01 after a few seconds but it gets not further.

Similarly, if I switch to the Google Play Music app, the timer happily ticks away, but no sound comes out. Switching again to, say, N7, we are back to the same PlayerPro behaviour.

It appears not to depend on the media player, though I usually use PlayerPro. It usually happens after using DoggCatcher, but then again, it is the only app I use for podcasts.

The only solution I have so far, is to restart the device - a bit inconvenient, particularly when driving.

Has anyone else experienced something similar? Any idea what is cause these media players to 'pause'? Any tips on investigating this issue?

Answer 1

I had to rebuild my phone after a firmware update; in doing so, I skipped over a lot of the Junk that I'd previously installed. The upshot is that I no longer suffer this problem (nor several others that had crept in). While it could be the software update that was the solution, I suspect that it was more likely that the clean install that did the trick.

On the plus side, the problem has disappeared; on the negative side, we don't know what the solution is.