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I have the music volume in Minecraft set to 100%. The music tends to play for a while, fade away, and I don't hear it again. Sometimes changing the music volume gets it going again, but not right away.

Why does this happen?
And is there some way to force the music to play all the time?

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  • If you really want to have the music on all the time, the Soundtrack is available on Spotify. Mute the ingame music and let Spotify play in the background.
    – Fredy31 ♦
    Commented Jun 14, 2019 at 19:43

6 Answers 6

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It is normal for the music to fade out, but it should come back on later; a random music track is played at sunrise, sunset, noon and midnight. There is no easy way to have the music play all of the time.

C418, the composer who created the music for Minecraft, talked about this (and the reason for it) in an interview:

You also had the limitations of the sound engine to deal with.

Yeah. A couple years ago if you had two song files at once, it would actually crash. There were so many more weird glitches like that the guys never really fixed because they were too busy with the actual game and not the sound engine.

Did you try to take advantage of those limitations?

Yeah. One of the things that we really can’t figure out is what a player is doing. Is the player in a cave? Or is he in a house that he made himself? So I decided to basically have music that doesn’t really explain anything. It doesn’t say if it’s battle or if it’s night... Generic music, but still kind of unique and different. Then we had that music randomly playing 15 to 20 minutes in, where there’s nothing else playing. If something significant is happening, the player remembers the music associated with it. If the music is playing and nothing really is happening, they’ll just accept it. Originally I was like, “You should probably play the music as few times as possible because it’s probably going to be annoying.” And it turns out the pause in between actually helps.

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The main point of the occasional nature of music in Minecraft is to build atmosphere. Minecraft is a, somewhat, lonely and isolated game (if you're not playing with tons of people yelling over Skype) so the game tends to be quite silent and atmospheric. There is no way to make the music play all the time since the sound design of the game is created in such a way that music plays at certain events, whether it's combat, nightfall or a sunrise. To look at it a different way, Minecraft is supposed to be, actually, a really creepy game (and if you are playing alone, it certainly is). So that answers the question of why Minecraft music is not playing all the time (of course, including colorfusion's answer about the technical limitations). As far as making it play all the time - no, you can't. I've searched for mods that do that to no avail, unfortunately.

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That's just the way Minecraft was made. Presumably, the short bursts of music are to add to the ambiance. Short of mods or an external media player, I don't believe there is a way to make music play all the time.

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Try it with a Command block...

/give @p minecraft:command_block

In the Command Block:

/playsound "Folder" "musicname" @a

Command block: set to 'Always active' and 'Repeating'

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You could also just look up the Minecraft soundtrack on youtube and have it play while in game. If this makes your game slower, then set the quality of the video to the lowest choice. I run a pretty old Mac and this seems to work for me! Hope it could help.

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Here's a link to the Minecraft OST in a Youtube "Playlist" form, so it'll play through all of the tracks in their entirety. You can also right click the video while it's playing, or double-finger click on mac, and select "Loop" to loop the song on replay.

If you can play that while you're playing Minecraft, you're good! Just go in to the game options and find the audio settings. There you should be able to turn the Music all the way down in game while you listen to music. Me personally, I have a PS4 hooked up to the tv. I'm sure there's a way spotify Minecraft music, but I'm not a Spotify guy, so I use "Remote Play" to play ps4 games on my laptop. So there, I open Youtube with the link above and play PS4 Minecraft on the same device. Very convenient. I understand though, people will have their different reasons for this. Some may want to send the audio signal through different devices or one single device. This isn't an option for everyone. It could help some people though. Hopefully_

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  • 2
    The main (titular) question is why the music stops playing. Your answer is helpful, but it's good to address at least the main question, and treat secondary questions as such. If you could update your answer to address it, that would be great!
    – Joachim
    Commented May 3, 2020 at 10:59
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    Heard. I respect your advice and I appreciate it. That was the first post I had ever made on here, and quite sure the only one so far as of the time of writing this. I had hardly any interest in this website at the time and didn't even know what it was. I was just wondering the same thing and chanced upon the link. Ended up here. I saw the response just before mine, and wanted to chime in so that whoever was interested in this approach had a better understanding of how to do so. I now mainly use this website to learn code. I will not change my response here, but will adhere moving forward.
    – eye was
    Commented Jun 17, 2022 at 14:44

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