Audio not playing

Loadout doesn't play back music. The only audio it produces is the metronome click — from the practice popover, the on-stage strip, or the leader's broadcast.

If that's what's silent, here's the triage.

1. Visual-only mode

The metronome panel has a visual-only toggle in its kebab menu. When on, the pulse animation and edge-flash both run but no audio plays. If you see the pulse but hear nothing, this is the first thing to check — open the panel's kebab menu and confirm the visual-only toggle is off.

(Yes, this means the pulse running without sound is the expected behavior of visual-only mode; the article wording used to say the opposite.)

2. Browser audio autoplay

Browsers (especially Safari, iOS Safari) block audio until the user has interacted with the page. If you've loaded the metronome panel and clicked nothing, the first click on Play might not produce sound. Click Play again. On mobile Safari, you may need to tap somewhere on the page first to "unlock" audio.

3. System volume

Obvious, but: phone in silent mode? Mac muted? Headphones plugged in but pointing elsewhere?

On iOS, the silent switch on the side of the phone mutes the metronome even if the volume buttons show full. Flip the switch.

4. Bluetooth audio routing

If you're connected to a Bluetooth speaker / in-ear monitor:

• Open your system audio settings — confirm output is going where you want.
• Disconnect and reconnect Bluetooth — sometimes the codec negotiation puts metronome audio on a different stream than music apps.
• Try wired headphones to isolate whether Bluetooth is the issue.

5. The metronome sound is set to silence

Each metronome has a configurable sound. If somehow the sound was changed to a near-silent option (or one that's broken in your browser's codec support), the click won't be audible. Open the panel's kebab menu → Sound and try a different option.

6. In-ear broadcast: are you a follower?

If you're on stage as a follower with broadcast click receiving from the leader: you'll only hear it when the leader has broadcast click toggled on AND the sync connection is open. If the Wi-Fi icon on your Leader pill shows disconnected, you won't receive the click.

See Metronome on stage for the broadcast specifics.

What "audio" Loadout doesn't do

To save people some time looking:

• Loadout doesn't play back songs or recordings.
• Loadout doesn't accept audio uploads.
• The "auto" Follow mode for lyric timing uses LRCLib timestamps, not audio — there's no audio playback, even when LRCLib data is present.

If you were expecting recorded-track playback, you're thinking of a different app.

What's next

• Metronome on stage — what should work.
• Per-song metronome — practice-mode reference.