iPhone not transmitting music?

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iPhone not transmitting music?

This is the weirdest thing. I'm a film editor, and yesterday I had a phone conversation with my boss - both on iPhones - where he said he couldn't hear the music cues on my latest export. He held up his phone and played the video on his laptop, but he was right - I could hear the voices but not the music. So I called up the sequence on my iMac, turned it up loud, held the phone up to the computer - and he said he couldn't hear it! I kept playing it, and he said he could hear my voice but not the music. We had to do a Zoom call so he could hear what I was talking about. Is there any possible reason why both of our iPhones would not transmit music playing off our computers? Thanks...

iPhone 16

Posted on Nov 15, 2025 9:46 AM

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Answer 1

Dec 18, 2025 2:40 AM in response to Memo2Self

What you ran into is a real, well‑documented behavior of iPhones during phone calls. And it can feel absolutely surreal if you’ve never hit it before.

🎧 Why your iPhones “filtered out” the music

During a cellular phone call, iPhones (and most smartphones) aggressively filter audio to prioritize speech and suppress anything that sounds like:

Background noise
Music
Ambient audio
Anything not shaped like a human voice

This is done by the phone’s voice isolation algorithms, which are designed to make calls clearer in noisy environments. The system literally tries to remove anything that doesn’t match the acoustic profile of speech.

So when you held your phone up to your iMac speakers:

Your voice came through because it matches the speech profile
The music was suppressed because the phone classified it as background noise
Your boss’s phone did the same thing in reverse

This is why Zoom worked — Zoom uses a completely different audio pipeline that allows full‑bandwidth audio, including music.

I have experienced the same with FaceTime and MS Teams, too.

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