Having trouble with Bluetooth on Echo Tap

[Beebes]

I have a new Amazon Echo Tap, and I'm having trouble using Bluetooth with it.

I have a Motorola Moto G3 cell phone.  For a few days, I was able to play podcasts from the Moto to the Tap with no problems.  Last night, the Bluetooth connection stopped working.  Pairing between the Moto and the Tap seems to work -- both the Moto and the Tap acknowledge a successful Bluetooth connection.  However, when I play a podcast, I hear only a faint click coming from the tap speaker, followed by silence.

Podcast audio works fine using the phone's speaker, without Bluetooth connected to anything.  I can connect the phone via Bluetooth to my A/V receiver and hear audio through the receiver without problem, so it seems the phone and the phone's Bluetooth work correctly.

I reproduced the Tap problem with my Nexus 7 tablet, which exhibits the same problem when connected to the Tap via Bluetooth.  And a different podcast player on the Moto phone has the same problem when connected to the Tap via Bluetooth.

I tried the obvious troubleshooting procedures.  I configured Bluetooth on the Tap to "forget" my phone and then repaired.  The phone and Tap are fully charged and are close to each other.  There's no obvious source of interference that accounts for the behavior.

I experimented playing the phone's built-in ring tones via Bluetooth. I thought I was able to hear a ringtone from the phone through the Tap, connected via Bluetooth.  However, when I tried to reproduced that behavior a couple hours later, I was *not* able to hear the ringtone on the Tap. This inconsistent result is confusing, and my test may have been flawed.

Is my Tap defective, or is there something else I can try to get it to work?

Thanks for your help.

[mike27oct]

Hmm, mine is working fine, so let's see if you can clear the problems.  I have a couple of Taps, so I first needed to get one going again w/BT, so I went into BT settings of Tap.(I also had my iPhone playing a music app called Slacker thru the phone speaker.)  Since I had not used this setup for a while, I just tapped on pair BT in Alexa app, and was told to turn on phone BT, and go into phone setting and look for which Amazon BT signal to connect to.  I did, and the two devices were paired/connected right away.  After listening to Tap a while I told Tap to disconnect BT.  It did not auto connect to phone again.  I turned off phone BT, and in a moment I turned it back on again.  I then told Tap to connect BT, it did so and the music was playing again.

They have been playing together for quite a while now with no issues.  If you are having issues, do what should be done with any device acting up.  Reboot it.  In case you don't know how to reboot the Tap, you must hold in the Power button on back for around 3 seconds; until it omits 3 beeps and goes into complete shut down mode.  After a few seconds press in the power button and unit will restart from scratch, including reconnecting to the router.  This is how I always turn off my Tap; otherwise, just pressing in the power button briefly just puts the Tap in standby and batteries can run down; they won't with the complete shut down.

Also, if you know how to completely reboot your phone, do this too at the same time you reboot the Tap.

Let us know how it all goes for you.  Good luck.

[Beebes]

Thanks for the useful reply.  I rebooted my Tap as you described, and it seems to have fixed the bluetooth problem.

I usually reboot devices when they don't work correctly.  However, I was not aware of the press-and-hold-power-button technique for the Tap.  Good to know.

[mike27oct]

Hope it continues to work well for you.  There is online help for the Amazon devices at the Help tab at the top of their home page, here:
https://www.amazon.com/gp/help/customer/display.html/ref=nav_cs_help?ie=UTF8&nodeId=508510