I first came upon this phenomenon while riding in our family's road trip to Niagara Falls and back. To while away the hours (and to take advantage of the fact that T-Mobile allows data to be used without charge if it's being used for streaming services), I listened to games and music through the SiriusXM app on my smartphone. It was hard at times -- no, make it most times -- to listen while we were trekking through the Northeast and Midwest. There are probably many reasons it was hard to listen to reliably. I have an old phone. I'm guessing the 3G isn't all that great, and we may have hit some dead spots driving through the country. I'm sure there was a lot of interference I encountered, if it was going through an underpass or even a bad spot in the car. And the app, to be honest, isn't great; I've called customer service a couple times and they said to delete the app and then reinstall, which I did once. No dice.
Sometimes I got something weird. After changing the channel to either listen to music or a game, I would hear, oh, ten seconds of something, and then I would hear it again. It would play on a loop, which is something I had never heard before.
That had happened since, but it got ridiculous Wednesday. I wanted to listen to the Michigan-Illinois men's basketball game, and it got into this rut -- I think Michigan called for a sub, and then the play-by-play guy touched on the Wolverines' record, and then I noticed that a loud bang starts this snippet.
And then I did something: Nothing. I have no idea why this loop happens, but I wondered if the channel or the application could work its way out of it, maybe shutting itself down, like a lot of iOS programs do. So I waited. And waited. But I heard the same ten seconds or so. I let it go for a few minutes, and then I decided to heck with the game, I want to see what's going to happen.
I was doing other things and left the app on my phone on. Heard the same thing on a loop. Plugged it into the outlet to recharge the smart ... and I heard that thing, still. That's when I decided to take a nap in the evening. Slept about 3 1/2 hours before waking up around the turn of the day -- and Christ, that bang and the buzzer indicating the sub and the announcement of saying Michigan has a record of ... and then it gets cut off, that was all still going.
This was very disconcerting, but at this point I just wanted to see if this damn thing was going to go all night. I was going to cut this off in the morning to listen to Miller on Progress, but I was hoping it would self-correct. And yet ... I really wanted to see if this app would be so bad that I would wake up listening to it. So I turned down the volume, plugged in my HP tablet that is no more than an alarm clock these days (just in case this loop shuts down the phone and thus the alarm on it), and fell asleep.
Welp, it did shut itself off. Maybe the bad wi-fi at home cut off the loop. However ... when I got to my cube, and turned back on the app, it was on the channel it was where I left it, which was ESPN Xtra, and a few seconds later -- "Bang, here comes what's-his-name for Michigan, who come into this contest with a record of ... bang, here comes what's-his-name for Michigan, who. ..." So it stopped itself, only to be ready to boot back up as soon as I accessed the app. That is something the application should do; I just wished it didn't run around in circles with this endless loop. I had to change the channel to Stephanie Miller.
I don't know if it can be helped. I don't know if the SiriusXM app is bad. Crap, I just don't know.
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