Forerunner 255 does not sync music automatically when connected to power

I recently purchased a Forerunner 255 music after having previously owned a Vivoactive 4 and Vivoactive 3 music. With both of my Vivoactive watches, when I plugged them in to power the music would automatically sync (amazon music for example). With the Forerunner 255 music this does not happen, but I would like it to so I automatically pick up the latest podcasts to my watch (manual sync works fine but it's a pain to have to remember to do that). Am I missing a command/control to enable this?

0 global_local 8 months ago

I have noticed, that 255m don't does auto-sync before a battery is under 20%. If the 20% mark is reached, auto-sync starts.

0 6366654 8 months ago

Thanks - I usually don't let my battery drain that low so will give it a try.

Does anyone know if that 20% mark is changeable? My use case is that I typically plug in my phone every other night or so when I go to bed so usually the battery is above 50% so wouldn't trigger at the 20% mark but I'd like it to.

0 mw1717 8 months ago in reply to global_local

I always charge my watch with over 20% left. Still my watch always synchronizes with Spotify.

0 6366654 8 months ago

Interesting update - I had been using the beta version of the garmin connect app on my phone (Android). Wondering why auto music seemed to be working for others but not me I reverted back to the non-beta garmin connect app and for the first time my Forefunner 255 music auto sync'ed the music providers (amazon music and playrun). Not sure why that matters, maybe a bug. I'll experiement a little more and if I can figure out the exact cause report it to Garmin (and back here as well).

0 3756009 6 months ago

Were you able to solve the problem? For weeks, when my watch is plugged into power, it constantly gives the warning 'music synchronization failed'. I'm really bored now.

0 6366654 6 months ago in reply to 3756009

Not really, no. After several factory resets, the best I got to is that if I install amazon music while outside when the phone has GPS sync then the first time after a power on it will automatically sync reliably. After that it's hit or miss. Definitely less than half the time. When it fails, there is no message that it even tried. On even more rare occasions it do get that 'music synchronization failed' error but not really sure why. If I could return my watch I would and I'd go back to my Vivoactive 4 which worked flawlessly but I'm stuck at this point.

It would be nice if someone from Garmin would contact me to help debug the problem - I'm a former software engineer so pretty tolerant of work arounds and debugging stuff and would love to look at some (or have someone at Garmin look at) the internal logs to see why it's failing so we could resolve it. Unfortunately that seems like wishful thinking. I've gone from a huge Garmin advocate to being really disappointed and frustrated.

0 6366654 1 month ago

OK after several months of frustration (I had given up) I have finally pinpointed some of the problem. This is reliably repeatable. When the last music I listened to had "My Music" selected as the provider and I plug the device in, it automatically syncs every time. When any other app (Amazon Music, Playrun) was the last music I listened to there is no auto sync.

So at least I know how to make it auto-sync some of the time. This is not really acceptable since the process of selecting "My Music" before plugging in is more annoying than just manually syncing from the menu in one of the other apps. But at least this is a little more insight into what's going on.

0 6366654 9 days ago in reply to 6366654

Garmin finally fixed this. Don't know if it was in response to my debugging work or not, but I received an update about 2 weeks ago and the watch started behaving as expected (sync upon plugging in to power up, regardless of the last app that I was using). I decided to wait a few days just to be sure it was truly fixed before posting and then got another update but it seems to be completely fixed and working properly as expected now. Current version on my watch is Software Version Bundle 21.19 - so if you have this problem and don't have at least this version please be sure to upgrade your watch software & good luck!