When something is not working

A binaural beat is not a sound. It only exists when each ear hears its own tone, and the beat is what the listener perceives between them. Through a speaker, both ears hear both tones, and there is nothing to perceive. It is not quiet. It is absent.

Use headphones. If the session has to run through a speaker in the room, switch the beat from binaural to isochronic: an isochronic tone pulses rather than relying on two ears, and it survives a speaker intact.

Spatial Audio. It mixes what each ear hears in order to place sound in a room, which is exactly the separation a binaural beat depends on. Some headphones turn it on by themselves after an update, which is why this appears overnight with nothing changed.

Turn Spatial Audio off for those headphones. On iPhone and iPad, hold the volume slider in Control Centre while the headphones are connected and set it to Off. Head tracking off is not enough; Spatial Audio itself has to be off.

A Private Browsing window. On iPhone, Private Browsing disables background audio outright, so the moment the screen locks the sound ends. In an ordinary window the audio carries on through a locked screen perfectly well.

This one is worth stating plainly because it looks exactly like a fault in the player, and it is not. It cost us weeks of engine work before the cause was found.

Open the page in a normal tab rather than a private one. If you keep a private window for client work, keep Mindspace in a separate ordinary window alongside it.

The playlist ran out. Ten tracks is roughly fifty minutes. In a seventy-five minute session that leaves twenty-five minutes of silence, and the beat stops with the music because there is nothing left to carry it.

Turn repeat on before the client arrives. It is not on by default, and it is the single most common cause of a session going quiet. Once it is on, the playlist runs until you stop it, however long the session takes.

The tab was closed. A mix is built on your own computer rather than on a server, so closing the tab does not pause the work, it ends it. Nothing is stored anywhere to return to.

Leave the tab open until the download appears. Moving to another tab or another app is fine; the work continues. A long recording at the highest quality takes the longest, so if you are in a hurry, render at 192 rather than 320.

The app wants a different format. The Session Mixer produces an MP3, which nearly everything plays. A few pieces of recording and course software want M4A or WAV instead and will simply refuse an MP3 without explaining why.

Check what the app accepts before converting anything. If it needs another format, convert the finished MP3 rather than re-rendering, so the licence reference written into the file travels with it.